2025 Reading Challenge 04 The Human Factor
The Human Factor is a cold war spy novel by Graham Greene. It concerns a leak in M16’s Africa section. Things are quickly complicated by love, loyalty and an unpleasant drooling dog. This is an unromantic, slow burn book, little of the James Bond about this story.
Written in 1978, it perfectly mirrors the likes of Smiley’s People that I watched on telly in the 80s; slow, character-driven, moral choices aplenty and a great array of cold and unfeeling civil servants.
I thought I would struggle with this, but I managed to devour it in five days, a record. Perhaps it was the age of the main protagonist, Castle, and the parallels with myself coming to the end of my career too. It is at times depressing and you have to feel for Davis, but there are also comedic moments and the dialogue is classic Greene; understated, everyone saying less than they actually mean.
Lastly, a mention of the politics and terrible hypocrisy as the British government of the day; criticising Apartheid publicly, whilst using all their dark forces privately to stop the white government in South Africa from falling into black and communist hands.
I rated it 8.4 out of 10.
TTRPG Thoughts:
Immediately what springs to mind is The Agency by Paul Baldowski, another of his Sanction Genre Setups. Betrayals, the Cold War setting, kitchen sink downtime with Buller, and some difficult topics to face, such as racism, need some lines and veils for that.
Hand out secret objectives and hidden agendas for each PC, track their morality, allow an underhand PC to share secrets with the other side and make good use of clocks to build up the tension, “Just 24 hours before the Africa report is flagged as missing!”.
Ultimately to replicate the world and character situations that Greene has created, there’s nothing better in my opinion than Dramasystem - play through those stiff-upper-lip conversations between Castle and his senior management, as they dance around what they may or may not know.