I was a great admirer of Greene through his work in film (he wrote the screenplay for The Third Man, one of my all-time favorites, and his novel A Gun For Sale was adapted into the excellent film noir This Gun For Hire) but I'd never actually read one of his books. I'd picked this paperback up forever ago and a recent deep dive into James Bond movies made me finally open it up, though this couldn't be further from the broad camp of Ian Fleming's character (who gets wryly name-dropped here a handful of times by jaded intelligence experts who live drastically less romantic lifestyles) and thank God.

The thing I always admired about the films Greene was involved in was how they were thrilling and expertly plotted, but every single scene still felt more driven by character development than the forceful hand of the writer. The same is true in The Human Factor, which manages to use the existential conundrum of British Intelligence paranoia to explore more universal themes of looking back at one's life with regret and bewilderment WHILE ALSO being an exciting page-turner about the hunt for a KGB mole. The story leaps between several different character POVs and nearly every single person is rich, three-dimensional and lives with a tenuous balance between the potential happy life that eluded them at some point in the past and the fleeting grip they have on whatever happiness they have eked out.

If you are looking for an adventure tale with exotic locations and heroic action set-pieces, keep looking. Only a single bullet is fired in this book and the context is not at all what you might expect. But if you want a credible spy yarn with remarkably rich characters, I highly recommend this. Greene's style is extremely readable too, always vivid and emotional but never more embellished than it needs to be. Clearly I need to read a lot more of his work! I'm open to any recommendations.