Reading (in) Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear (1943)

Abstract

This essay offers a transgeneric reading of Graham Greene's 1943 novel The Ministry of Fear, first tracing the emergence of spy fiction from invasion fiction at the end of the nineteenth century and then establishing William Le Queux's influence on the culture of espionage in Britain as well as in British spy fiction. Following on from this genealogy of genre, it interrogates the novel's protagonist's claim that “[t]he world has been remade by William Le Queux” in the context of the dual histories of espionage in Britain and the spy in British fiction, while attending to the novel's own reception of those histories. Focusing on the significance of the novel's intertextual and paratextual evidence in an interpretation of the novel's unconventional narrative strategies, the essay examines hybrid modes of reading the novel, as well as reading in the novel as a way of parsing its entangled narrative modes, levels, and discourses. Greene encourages transgeneric reading as a possible resolution to the epistemological uncertainty readers experience at the novel's close due to its troubling of genre expectations, its allusiveness, and, ultimately, its eschewal of narrative closure. At the same time, the essay proposes that, in attending in spy fiction to what is read and how it is read, we might better appreciate the challenges presented by the rehabilitation of a genre that also requires disentangling the many hierarchies of modernist cultural production.

Modernism's Trouble with Genre

For William DuBois, who reviewed Graham Greene's 1943 novel The Ministry of Fear in the New York Times, the novel was “more than a mere thriller.” DuBois noted that its protagonist is “trailed by all the characters in the old police romances,” suggesting that what distinguishes this novel from other thrillers or spy fictions is its generic self-awareness (DuBois 3). DuBois also characterized Greene as a “conjurer” who “lets [readers] burn—and makes [them] linger over apparent trifles” (3). Brian Diemert attributes this playful self-awareness to the novel being a “book about texts” as well as “a book about itself” and contends that The Ministry of Fear is “a story of reading” in which the “already-read” takes on “ambiguous status” (177, 173, 176). Greene's novel certainly demonstrates a high level of what Heta Pyrhönen refers to as “generic competence,” in that it prompts its readers to correctly identify “what is salient in the genre” while demonstrating their “responsiveness and suppleness” to this salience (118). But while its attention to genre makes The Ministry of Fear “more than a mere thriller,” the novel's interest in reading as a practice, particularly rereading and reading across the conventions of different genres, makes it more than a story of reading. Rather, The Ministry of Fear interrogates what Nicola Humble identifies as received notions about “the culture and practices of reading as they changed and developed” over the course of first half of the twentieth century (42). Additionally, attending to reading (in) The Ministry of Fear allows for a reconfiguration of the conversation about modernism's relationship with genre that foregrounds the wider “historical phenomenon” of “generic change”—in this instance, the emergence of spy fiction from invasion fiction—but also problematizes the stability of categories within modernism's hierarchies of cultural production (Pyrhönen 121).

As a novel, The Ministry of Fear is no more “ambiguous” than any other novel that plucks at the tension between the conventional (what makes this a novel as opposed to another form of literature) and the unconventional (what makes this a novel that strains the form of novel). However, the recognized ambiguity of Greene's novel is imbricated in the “extra-literary concerns” shaping this “generic change” (Pyrhönen 121), notably the “black-out” and the London Blitz, and this accounts for its significance to the idea of a plural modernism defined not only by ideology, epistemology, and aesthetics but also by contexts (Whitworth 275, 279).¹ Humble's contention that questions of how and why we read are as important as those that ask what we read (47, 51) extends Ann L. Ardis's critique of “modernist reading protocols” that involved “discrediting other ways of reading” (Ardis 106). But our concern with “other ways of reading” should not be taken as a capitulation to the colonizing tendency of new modernist studies to recast as modernist that which was previously excluded from the modernist canon. Rather, it is as part of a concerted effort to recontextualize modernism within a field of cultural production that includes genre fiction that this article invites a rereading of spy fiction that assumes a “cultured reader”—a reader at once primed to be challenged by a text's difficulty and obscurity and untroubled by narratives whose epistemological uncertainty culminates in open-ended closure, but who is still capable of reading for pleasure and of appreciating how conventions of genre can be used to play with and subvert novelistic form and readerly expectations. Greene's deft manipulation of these conventions and his inculcation of the reading practices necessary to appreciate them in The Ministry of Fear exemplifies both what modernism finds troubling about genre and what modernist studies (and literary studies more broadly) finds particularly troubling about spy fiction. Indeed, we might lament, as Isobel Maddison does, that, unlike many of the other genres popular during the first half of the twentieth century, spy fiction “has not yet fully been ‘rehabilitated’” in literary studies (92). But I argue that in attending in spy fiction to what is read and how it is read, we might better appreciate the challenges presented by the rehabilitation of a genre that also requires disentangling the many hierarchies of modernist cultural production.

By tracing the emergence of spy fiction from invasion fiction at the end of the nineteenth century and foregrounding William Le Queux's influence on the culture of espionage in Britain as well as in British spy fiction, this article establishes The Ministry of Fear as a metahistorical rereading of the spy fiction genre. Following this genealogy of the genre, it evaluates Arthur Rowe's claim in The Ministry of Fear that “[t]he world has been remade by William Le Queux” (Greene 65) in the context of the dual histories of espionage in Britain and of the spy in British fiction and from the perspective of the novel's reception of those histories. Rather than argue that Greene's novel belongs to a new subgenre of modernist spy fiction, this article demonstrates that the transgeneric reading Greene prescribes in his novel enacts a possible resolution to the epistemological challenges posed by modernism's resistance to classification and troubling of genre conventions. Focusing on the significance of the novel's intertextual and paratextual elements for an interpretation of the novel's unconventional narrative strategies, this article then explores the hybrid modes of reading Greene models in the novel as part of his subversion of the trope that life is more comprehensible as fiction (or at least in terms of its conventions). It extends these hybrid modes of reading to the novel itself to account for how its protagonist's familiarity with the conventions of spy fiction facilitates readers’ decoding of the mixed signals transmitted by the novel's many fictional forms. Finally, extending Eyal Segal's concept of “narrative ‘openness’” in detective fiction to spy fiction (162), this article reconsiders the epistemological uncertainty readers are left with at the novel's close not as a sign of narrative failure, but as a marker of a text that invites a transgeneric reading. For if, as Jonathan D. Culler proposes, “the text is an intertextual construct, comprehensible only in terms of other texts which it prolongs, completes, transforms, and sublimates” (120), this model of transgeneric reading can also help to decipher modernist texts that are not only highly allusive and intertextual but also actively trouble the boundaries of genre fiction (and vice versa).

A Gen(r)ealogy: From Fictions of Invasion to Spy Fiction

“Espionage,” according to Allan Hepburn, “is not strictly a novelistic phenomenon, nor a twentieth-century one. Literature and spying have a long, intertwined lineage” (18). A mutual influence between literature and spying can, however, only be established by unravelling this “lineage” and carefully separating spying in fiction from spy fiction. Hepburn begins this endeavor by distinguishing the “politically motivated spying” of spy fiction from the “domestic espionage” of fiction in general. He explains that “[s]tate secrets motivate the former, curiosity the latter” (18–19). Indeed, many narratives are driven by the watching of certain persons by another individual, although watching alone does not make an individual a spy. Rather, spying involves gathering information on the subject being observed, often on behalf of some larger group, whether it be a state, an organization, or shadowy body. In other words, there must be surveillance.² So, while there is merit to Hepburn's distinction, its focus on “motivation” produces an unreasonably restricted definition of spy fiction. Numerous accounts of the development of spy fiction as a genre are based on its structure, themes, and historical contexts, as well as on its relationship to other genres of literature, offering a gen(r)ealogy of sorts.³ Many of these accounts share the premise that genre is not a fixed classification but a category that is both reactive and reflexive. Genre cannot be defined by any one characteristic but by the interaction of its many constituent characteristics and conventions. Reading spy fiction (and reading in spy fiction) is always an act of deciphering these conventions.

John G. Cawelti and Bruce A. Rosenberg propose that spy fiction must be “a story whose protagonist has some primary connection with espionage” (5). In yoking the genre's definition to the plot, they open up a range of narrative possibilities that include stories about amateur secret agents, double agents, agents provocateurs, informants, spymasters, cryptographers and cryptanalysts, traitors, and fifth columnists. Cawelti and Rosenberg see the development of the genre as an “evolution” from the “nineteenth-century colonial adventure story” to “an increasingly complex exploration of the psychological, philosophical, and cultural significance of clandestinity” (22, 25). As the world becomes more complex, so does spy fiction. In this respect, spy fiction appears to reflect reality, or at least the view that the world is becoming progressively more complicated. David Stafford, who is also interested in the genre's “evolution,” identifies “the changing state of international law and order in the dying days of Victoria's reign” and the subsequent development of “overt and covert intelligence” as the two external factors motivating the differentiation of spy fiction from its precursors: detective, sensation, adventure, and invasion fictions (492–93). Stafford's distinction supports a reading of Spies of the Kaiser: Plotting the Downfall of England, Le Queux's 1909 novel detailing the discovery of German espionage in Britain, as marking a shift away from the emphasis the novelist placed on thwarting an invasion plot or discovering the communication network of an invading force in his earlier work. Instead, two amateur gentlemen, John James Jacox (“Jack”) and his friend Ray Raymond, uncover and foil foreign spies’ clandestine plot to steal “the new plans for our naval base at Rosyth,” north of the Firth of Forth in Scotland (Le Queux, Spies 12).⁴ For David Seed, however, spy fiction differs more from detective fiction than it does from invasion fiction. This is because both narratives often involve some form of investigation, as is the case in Le Queux's Spies of the Kaiser when Jack refers to his investigations of German spies with Raymond as “detective work” (Spies 15). Seed explains that, whereas detective fiction hopes to solve a “discrete crime,” investigations in spy fiction hope to uncover some “covert action,” such as espionage by a foreign power, a double agent leaking intelligence to the enemy, or a bomb plot by domestic anarchists, revolutionaries, or terrorists. Seed's differentiation can help to explain how Greene exploits subtle differentiations in types of investigation in The Ministry of Fear, where, as I will discuss, there is less certainty about what or who, precisely, is under investigation. Generally, in spy fiction, intelligence agents must gather information and decipher codes before they can unravel the clandestine threats from a complex web of international relations and, hopefully, protect the nation. The discovery of covert action can either affirm the authority of the agency, group, or nation for which the agent is working, or it can subvert or challenge it (Seed 121).

Early iterations of spy fiction complicate rather than clarify this distinction. In Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907), for instance, there is a simultaneous discovery of a discrete crime (Who was responsible for the explosion at Greenwich?) and of covert action (Was the explosion a foreign or domestic plot and, if the latter, was there a foreign agent provocateur at work?). Both investigations are undertaken by the same agency within the police and the solutions to both are closely related, frustrating structuralist approaches to distinguishing spy fiction from detective fiction. The novel's resistance to classification was not lost on contemporary reviewers of The Secret Agent, who compared it with other popular detective fictions of the period, notably Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes series (Glazzard 27). Readers’ palpable disappointment that Conrad's novel did not fit within the established paradigm of the “detective story” is reflected in an anonymous reviewer's lament of the novel's lack of “mystery” (Simmon et al. 346–47; Glazzard 27). Ostensibly a spy novel gone wrong, G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) proves an interesting foil to Conrad's novel, satirizing the entanglement of detection and espionage that frustrates readers of The Secret Agent. After an ideological dispute with an anarchist whom he meets at a party, a poet infiltrates the anarchist's cover circle. He is then recruited to join a secret detective unit whose remit is to expose foreign and domestic anarchist plots. But, as is gradually revealed, this unit is comprised of the members of that same anarchist circle in disguise; ultimately, there is no discrete crime to detect, no covert action to uncover. In their own way, both The Secret Agent and The Man Who Was Thursday resist classification. However, this does not preclude the structuralist approach to defining spy fiction but rather suggests that the limitations of this approach can serve as a heuristic device to detect fictions that trouble the boundaries of genre.

We can further distinguish genre fictions from detective fiction, according to Hepburn's useful model, by the type of reading and interpretation each requires. He explains that, while detective fiction is “about exegesis (clues, typically objects and instruments, require literal reading in a literal order as realism),” spy fiction is “about hermeneusis (codes, typically numbers or words, require decipherment as allegory)” (25).⁵ We need to read “espionage thrillers” allegorically because they “inculcate . . . the impossibility of truth and commitment within ideology.” Essentially, Hepburn agrees with Seed that spy fiction is defined by the discovery of the “betrayal and doublecrosses” of espionage (Hepburn 25), although he might not reduce spy fiction to the uncovering of “covert action,” as Seed does. For Hepburn, how we read a novel is the most important factor in determining its genre. And yet, while he proposes that we use the literary analogies of exegesis (clues) and hermeneusis (codes) to distinguish between the types of reading required by detective fiction (exegesis) and spy fiction (hermeneusis), he stops short of suggesting how one might perform such allegorical readings. To supplement Hepburn's clues/codes binary, we must turn to the proponents of genre-determining reading.

Robert Lance Snyder's reading of “espionage fiction” can help to decode the allegorical reading Hepburn prescribes. He argues that we should further distinguish espionage fiction from spy fiction because of a tension he identifies in readers and the protagonist, on the one hand, and the author and the enigma, on the other. Espionage fiction also has a certain reflexivity absent in spy fiction. For, just as “the protagonist [of the former] struggles to decipher some central enigma while authorial concealment and protraction defer its resolution,” its readers “become accomplices in a metatextual drama of interpretation” (Snyder 7). Allegorical readings can resolve the tension created by these enigmas between the different diegetic levels of a narrative. But beyond suggesting an alignment between readers and protagonists in their struggles, Snyder gives little indications of how to resolve what he refers to as the “central enigma” at the heart of espionage fiction.

Reading takes on a different inflection where double agents are concerned for Phyllis Lassner. Since the double agent must adopt another identity to infiltrate enemy ranks, reading becomes an integral part of missions that depend on uncovering “double meanings in [the agent's] experiences and discoveries.” She identifies two different types of reading at work in the narrative of Helen MacInnes's Assignment in Brittany (1942). The double agent, Michael Hearne, must both read “with the grain” to “decipher” the enemy's plans, and “against the grain” to uncover his ally's collaboration with the enemy (Lassner 123). While the former involves double agents comprehending, correctly interpreting, and successfully applying knowledge from the official spy book, the latter demands they “read” cultural and historical contexts. Both types of reading are useful when spy fictions transgress genre boundaries, since “reading with the grain” entails an awareness of the genre's conventions and limitations, while “reading against the grain” would allow readers to make connections beyond the genre. These methods of reading (in) spy fiction run parallel to the basic principles of deconstruction set out by Paul de Man.⁶ However, the metaphorical nature of Lassner's terminology proves absolutely necessary for avoiding unintentional punning within a discipline that characterizes literature as a code and likens reading to decoding.

Greene's exploitation of the genre's permeability in The Ministry of Fear presents a challenge to these approaches to reading spy fiction. Using free indirect discourse, fragmentation, intertextual allusions, analepsis and prolepsis, and the mixing of literary “brows” (experimental narrative techniques characteristic of modernist fiction), Greene encourages this reactivity and exploits this reflexivity to complicate and ironize the genre's established tropes. In so doing, he effectively satirizes the often myopic nature of modernist explorations of epistemological uncertainty, demonstrating that such concerns are not exclusive to modernist literature. Yet while it is tempting to classify The Ministry of Fear as a hybrid modernist-spy fiction that destabilizes the boundaries between genres as well as narrative modes,⁷ this instability is a product of the transgeneric reading Greene encourages through his adoption of narrative strategies that seem unconventional outside of late modernist fiction. As I establish in my consideration of Greene's metahistory of spy fiction and through an extended deconstruction of reading in his novel, these strategies foreground the importance of transgeneric reading to deciphering encoded narratives.

After Le Queux; or, Reading with the Grain

Greene organizes his metahistory of spy fiction in The Ministry of Fear around Arthur Rowe's belief that “[t]he world has been remade by William Le Queux.” Le Queux's influence is palpable from the perspective of both the author and his protagonist. In a strange convergence of fiction and reality, his novels impacted the development of spy fiction as well as the practice of espionage in early twentieth-century Britain. Following the serial publication of Spies of the Kaiser in the Weekly News in the spring of 1909, Parliament opened an official inquiry into the presence of German spies in Britain.⁸ This, albeit indirectly, lay the foundations for the Official Secrets Act 1911 (Stafford 498–99; Stearn 43; Andrew 107–8; Porter, Plots 127–28). Le Queux takes credit for the emergence of a culture of surveillance and the formation of surveillance organizations in “If England Knew,” the ominously titled introduction published alongside the novel by Hurst and Blackett in 1909 (“If England” 6–10). There, Le Queux emphasized how his fiction and actions instigated these outcomes, claiming to have made “personal inquiry into the presence and work of these spies” that, much like his novel's protagonist, revealed the presence of German spies. The actual sequence of events is less straightforward than he suggests, but the parallel he draws between his fiction and real life points to a permeability between the two realms, despite the incongruity between the emergence of a culture of surveillance in the early years of the twentieth century and the development of surveillance organizations that formed in response to domestic and foreign political and ideological threats to Britain. Greene capitalizes on the myth of Le Queux's influence and exploits this incongruity so he can encode his narrative with subverted genre conventions.⁹ The attendant epistemological uncertainty belongs to Greene's unconventional narrative strategies.

Although the Official Secrets Act 1911 replaced the first act of 1889, Le Queux portrays his calls for the establishment “of some system of contra-espionage . . . as had been done in France” (7) as instrumental to its revision and reform (6). The Admiralty and the War Office cofounded the Secret Service Bureau in 1909; subsequently, the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence (MI6) were formed (Stafford 492–93, 507; Stearn 43). And, while Le Queux's efforts coincided with these initiatives, a uniquely English form of counterespionage already existed: Special Branch, which emerged as a division of the Criminal Investigations Department of the Metropolitan Police in response to the Fenian and anarchist bombings in London in the 1880s and 1890s. The decentralized nature of Britain's surveillance organizations meant that Special Branch was responsible for, among other things, investigating foreign threats to London (Shpayer-Makov 56).¹⁰ Moreover, whereas Special Branch reported directly to the Home Office via Scotland Yard, MI5 and MI6 were overseen by the Committee for Imperial Defence or, after 1936, by the Joint Intelligence Committee. Unsurprisingly, some of the confusion between detectives and spies evident in British genre fiction originated from this reactive division of responsibilities early in the history of these institutions.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the British public regarded the covert nature of this domestic espionage with suspicion. Winnie Verloc's distrust of Chief Inspector Heat in The Secret Agent and her subsequent misunderstanding of the role police play in crime prevention and investigation exemplified the public's distain for Special Branch's undercover detectives. In this context, the spies in Le Queux's invasion fictions helped to domesticate the secret agent, rendering domestic surveillance culture more palatable in Britain by appealing to a liberalist ideology (Stafford 494, 498–99). Alongside this literary domestication of counterespionage, the bifurcation of intelligence agencies opened up the potential for counterespionage against foreign agents in fiction and reality, and introduced the possibility of British agents going abroad to gather further information about foreign plots, to prevent such plots, or to incite plots of their own against foreign states. These are less common in early spy fiction and in its precursors, where it was more common to find examples of foreign spies, double agents, or fifth columnists (groups sympathetic to a country's enemy during wartime). Indeed, the first literary depiction of British spies abroad did not occur until after the Great War. William Somerset Maugham's Ashenden, or the British Agent, a collection of short stories published in 1928, is unique in its focus on British espionage abroad. Taking inspiration from Maugham's wartime involvement in the intelligence service, Ashenden is arguably the first “real” spy story (Cawelti and Rosenberg 44–45). After Maugham, the mutual influence of fictional depictions of espionage and its realities—both practicalities and public perceptions of it—developed as the twentieth century unfolded.

By the time The Ministry of Fear was published in 1943, sufficient time had passed since the founding myth of Le Queux's influence on spying and on spy fiction that it had become a subject ripe for satire.¹¹ Greene deploys unconventional narrative strategies to ensure readers and protagonist alike will struggle to resolve the enigma at the heart of his novel's epistemological uncertainty. All this entanglement and deciphering is orthogonal to the metahistory of the spy fiction genre Greene presents to his reader, making it that much harder for anyone to disentangle what is real fiction from what is fictional fiction within the narrative. Gérard Genette likens this sort of analysis of narrative discourse to “ripping apart a tight web of connections among the narrating act” (Narrative 215). Readers of The Ministry of Fear, however, must further parse acts of reading (both fictive and real) underpinning these narrative strategies across the different levels of the narrative. But before attempting this parsing, we should consider how Greene manipulates the conventions of prewar invasion fiction and the subsequent developments in spy fiction during the interwar period by more closely considering his construction of Arthur Rowe as the narrative's readerly, incidental counterspy.

Greene's foreign spies descend directly from Le Queux's Heinrich Klauber and his compatriots in Spies of the Kaiser. However, rather than German spies plotting to invade an undermilitarized Britain, the spies in The Ministry of Fear are a mix of Austrian expatriates working in aid of the Nazis and British fifth columnists with Fascist sympathies. The former infiltrate the country by adopting British mannerisms; their overly formal use of the English language betrays their foreignness. The latter are less detectable. Greene's fifth columnists’ illicit acquisition of the intelligence documents from a government minister also mirrors the preemptive methods of espionage in Le Queux's novel, where the theft of Britain's naval plans would further delay the country's development of its navy. Moreover, the Austrian's covert actions are discovered by Arthur Rowe, whose only qualifications are his careful and extensive reading of thrillers. Greene's use of a seemingly unwitting bystander is reminiscent of the incidental way Le Queux's Ray Raymond draws on information he uncovered through his civilian investigations of the German spies when correctly deducing the meaning of the signal light on the golf course. Unlike Raymond's deliberate discovery, Rowe's appears accidental (he receives a coded message intended for an undercover agent after guessing the correct weight of the prize cake while attending a borough fête), but this discovery relies on too many fortuitous coincidences for it to be a mere accident.¹² Adhering to the axiom of trusting the simplest explanation, we should recognize the coded-cake incident as an instance of conventional tradecraft. Greene's overly elaborate portrayal of tradecraft here should not be overlooked; it serves to submerge this subtle satirizing of the often implausibly constructed nature of tradecraft in conventional spy fiction.

Greene's revision of Le Queux requires Rowe be a less willing participant than his counterpart in Spies of the Kaiser, Raymond. Rowe's desire to unravel the plot through a fragmented, half-hearted investigation is motivated by self-preservation. Nevertheless, a version of the patriotic duty that impels Raymond to uncover the presence of German spies in Britain has been inculcated in Rowe through “the books of adventure [he] read as a boy” (Greene 176). His awareness of the conventions of adventure stories, invasion fictions, and spy novels allows him to become an astute reader in a world that, for reasons he does not comprehend, presents increasingly as a thriller—though this knowledge comes at a cost. Following his release from the asylum to which he had been committed after euthanizing his terminally ill wife, Rowe notices that he had rejoined a “different . . . a secret world of assumed names, of knowing nobody, of avoiding aces, of men who leave a bar unobtrusively when other people enter” (47). His disjunctive experience marks a shift in his perspective; he no longer approaches the world with the idealism and naivete he had before his wife's illness. But rather than assume that he was changed by his time in the asylum, Rowe theorizes that the world itself has changed. This concern is confirmed when he is forced to stay overnight in an underground station after his flat is destroyed in an air raid and he dreams of his mother, who lived in a world of “[t]ea on the lawn, evensong, croquet, the old ladies calling, the gentle unmalicious gossip, the gardener trundling the wheelbarrow full of leaves and grass” (75–76)—a world full of “not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene” detailed in George Orwell's Blitz-era essay “England Your England” (33).¹³ The prewar ideals Rowe believes his mother represents evoke a prewar arcadia later alluded to in “Conversations in Arcady,” the chapter in which Rowe suffers extensive memory loss.¹⁴ Such connections between the narrative and the novel's paratextual elements abound in The Ministry of Fear, and attending to these connections here reveals how Greene uses paratext to undermine readers’ narrative expectations while further troubling the already tenuous line between fiction and reality within the narrative. These paratexts require that Rowe and readers alike learn to read against the grain.

Lessons from The Little Duke; or, Reading against the Grain

Greene begins each chapter of The Ministry of Fear with an epigraph from Charlotte M. Yonge's 1854 novel The Little Duke, or Richard the Fearless—a popular work of didactic children's literature recounting the life of the great-grandfather of William the Conqueror. Genette's discussion of their paratextual function establishes epigraphs as a “justificatory appendage” for a work's title or “intertitles” (with the caveat that the inverse relationship is exceptionally possible). In prose narratives, their “most canonical” function is as textual commentaries or glosses, creating “semantic relevance” between text and paratext (Paratexts 157–58). Epigraphs in The Ministry of Fear function on multiple levels, creating meaning by transcending the boundaries between paratext and text. And yet, readers unfamiliar with Yonge's novel might dismiss these epigraphs as merely interesting and overlook The Little Duke's significance to what de Man calls an “allegory of reading.” Such a significance is apparent in the chapter titled “Between Sleeping and Waking,” in which Rowe's dreams of his mother converge with memories of reading imaginary thrillers. De Man's description of narratives that, according to Steven Mailloux, “diachronically represent elements (characters, events, ideas) as figurations of the reading act,” or that “represent temporal reading as allegories of reading or theories of reading (say hermeneutics or deconstruction),” can help readers to untangle the interplay between real fiction and fictional fiction at work in the narrative's liminal states (263).

The opening paragraph of “Between Sleeping and Waking” attends to those liminal states by acknowledging dreams’ irruptive capacity: “There are dreams which belong only partly to the unconscious; these are dreams we remember on waking so vividly that we deliberately continue them, and so fall asleep and wake and sleep and the dream goes on” (Greene 63). Preceded by an epigraph from an episode in The Little Duke in which the young Richard accompanies the King of France from his home in Rouen to the unfamiliar “royal castle of Laon,” this observation prompts readers to infer a connection between Greene's chapter title and its content. Confronted with “a great forest which seems to have no path through it,” the party in Yonge's novel is forced to cut across the forest and subsequent morass only to find themselves faced with “a long tract of dreary-looking heathy waste, without a sign of life” (Greene 63; Yonge 108). The entire journey is marked by alternating “waste lands, marshes, and forests,” paralleling the disorienting memories of prewar life Rowe himself must navigate from within the “dim lurid underground place” in which he takes shelter during the air raid (Yonge 110; Greene 47). Greene thus generates a thematic relationship between the paratext and the text itself. But if the chapter title serves to reinforce the chapter's themes of contrasting the dreamlike strangeness of reality with the simplicity of the past, what are readers to make of an epigraph that seems unrelated to either Rowe's dreams or his past?

Rowe's readerly relationship with The Little Duke during his youth is instructive here since its themes were central to the formation of his sense of self and his worldview.¹⁵ His memories of the novel persistently intrude into the narrative, revealing how intertwined his identity and perspective have become with the nostalgic ideals these memories evoke. For Beryl Pong, this continual “return to [Rowe's] past” (and texts from it) is a symptom of the novel's “distorted chronologies” that leave “narrative gaps [that] continue to obscure the text,” leading to “narrative perplexities” that “create multiple interpretations and readings.” As well as struggling to distinguish fiction from reality, in his attempting to “reread” his past, Rowe becomes “engaged in a continual and unsatisfying process of analysis and decipherment” (Pong). Thus, while this rereading motivates the narrative, it also frustrates both the protagonist's and readers’ progress. Rereading may help Rowe to regain a sense of his past self, but it cannot liberate him from the consequent knowledge of this past. At the same time, Yonge's novel's presence in The Ministry of Fear is a material one, as a recurring object that haunts Rowe and reminds him of the readerly ideals of his youth. He cannot seem to escape The Little Duke but, by reading both with the grain and against it, he can reconfigure his relationship with the novel and escape its didactic confines.

Attending a fête in Bloomsbury billed as supporting “The Free Mothers” fund, Rowe associates the current festivities, somewhat subdued by wartime, with the joys of his prewar youth. He recalls winning a “second-hand copy” of Yonge's novel at a summer fête during his childhood but then happens to purchase “a dingy copy” of The Little Duke that he spots among the bric-a-brac at a fête vendor's stall in the present (Greene 12–13, 14).¹⁶ Despite the moral certainty the novel and his memories of reading it provide, Rowe senses “something threatening . . . in the very perfection of the day” (14). Later, reflecting on the moral ambiguity of his own actions, he realizes that “we cannot recognize the villain and we suspect the hero” in a world where “[t]he Little Duke is dead and betrayed and forgotten” (89). Only then does he understand that he has outgrown the moral simplicity promoted by The Little Duke and other novels in its pattern. And yet, The Little Duke persists despite this revelation. His eventual recovery from his temporary amnesia is hastened by “an odd medley of impressions” comprising memories of reading the novel in childhood and of more recent incidents surrounding his purchase of a copy at the fete (147–48). During his subsequent confrontation with the fifth columnist Prentice, Rowe attributes the disjunction he experiences when he finally realizes that life “isn't how [he] imagined it” to his youthful insatiability for adventure stories as a form of moral pablum (162). The realities of the Blitz increasingly disrupt the novel's plot (a form of realist incursion) and begin to destabilize the distinctions Rowe perceives between fiction and reality, effectively mirroring a narrative trajectory toward enlightenment embedded within the structure of The Ministry of Fear. He begins as the eponymous “unhappy man” of the novel's first book, unwillingly caught up in the detection of an espionage plot. In the second book, following an amnesia-inducing explosion, Rowe becomes a “happy man,” ignorant of the facts he had previously uncovered. In “Bits and Pieces,” the third book, he tries to reassemble what he knows about the plot against him and recover his identity from fragments or memories and readerly clues. In the novel's final book, “The Whole Man,” Rowe attempts to resolve the espionage plot and return to normal life. However, he must learn to live with the knowledge that he can never regain his earlier, “happy” state of ignorance—a realization that undermines the desirability of achieving enlightenment.

For the attentive reader, however, this melancholic awareness is present from the novel's first book, where Greene ironizes the functions of children's literature as moral instruction by inviting a reading of The Little Duke paratext “against the grain” in chapter 5. By realizing the irony of an insurmountable-seeming task that is resolved over the course of a single paragraph, readers can recognize the misleading progression of the “intertitles” suggesting a direct path to self-realization or enlightenment. Here, the intricately framed paratext expands on the novel's late-modernist theme of epistemological uncertainty by strengthening this chapter's connection between the world of fiction (via Rowe's reading) and its arcadian past (via his dreams). Greene's intersplicing of frank, realist accounts of the London Blitz with the novel's fictional clandestine plots render Rowe's admission that “[t]his isn't real life anymore” an unsettlingly prescient gloss of his subsequent observation about Le Queux's influence (65). If Rowe, like the eponymous little Duke, is on a journey without a clear way forward, then the arcadia he conjures here (as well as the nostalgia he feels for it) results in a morass wherein fictions (and dreams) are distinguishable from reality only with difficulty.

Losing the Plot: When Is Fiction Just Fiction?

Greene's larger narrative strategy of imbricating readers in a metahistory of spy fiction that unfolds in parallel to the narrative of The Ministry of Fear also involves the trope of the indiscernibility of reality from fiction. This trope first becomes evident in a self-conscious reference made by Mr. Rennit, the private detective Rowe engages to discover who attempted to kill him. Rennit boasts that he “know[s] all the beginnings”; he has been in “this line of business” long enough to understand that “[e]very client thinks he is a unique case. He's nothing of the kind. He's just a repetition” (31). Without actually referring to the world beyond the narrative, Rennit's use of terms such as “beginnings” and “repetitions” references the conventions of fiction that underpin his own role in the narrative as the jaded private detective. He reasons that life “isn't like a detective story” because, in his experience, murderers “are rare people to meet” (35). Were this a conventional thriller, Rennit's ignorance of Rowe's personal history would introduce the narrative tension of a secret needing to be uncovered, driving readers’ desire to resolve that tension. But since readers are not only aware of the identity of Rowe's victim (his ailing wife), the nature of his crime (euthanasia), and his motive (love and pity), they become complicit with Rowe's withholding of his history from Rennit and, on another level, with Greene's ironizing of the convention that information withheld creates narrative suspense. Furthermore, by contriving for Rowe to lose then recover what readers have known from the outset (who he is, what he has done, and why), Greene complicates this irony, sublimating readers’ desire to resolve the mystery of the crime and identify the murderer into a hope for happy ignorance. In such circumstances, parsing genre conventions represented within the narrative and operating outside it proves most difficult, since the strategy operates on multiple, interpenetrating levels. While Genette's terminology of diegesis is useful for thinking about narratives with multiple instances or levels of narration, its limitations for disentangling multiple instances or levels of reading within those levels of narration reveals the need for a Bakhtinian mode of reading that enables readers to identify the different registers of “novelistic discourse” at work in the narrative (Bakhtin, “Discourse” 269).

The main narrative of The Ministry of Fear takes place during the London Blitz of September 1940 to May 1941¹⁷ and is what Genette would call “extradiegetic,” since it is the “first level” of narration (Narrative 228). But Rowe's dreams and flashbacks to the prewar (pre-1914) and interwar (1919–38) periods do not amount to a second narrative (what Genette refers to as “metadiegetic” or “narrative in the second degree” [231–32]). Rather, since they create disorder in the narrative's temporal sequence, Rowe's reveries are more appropriately considered a form of narrative “anachrony” (Genette, Narrative 40). With the exception of passages quoted from Tolstoy's What I Believe in the chapter “Conversations in Arcady” (where emphasis is placed on Rowe's reading of the texts, not on their narratives’ disruption of the main narrative) (Greene 131–32), the preponderance of texts in the main narrative are not what Genette would consider “intradiegetic,” or a “work within a work,” although there is a certain amount of interaction between levels of reading in the main narrative (Narrative 230). Just as Greene's portrayal of Rowe's experience in the Blitz is mediated by that of readers—who may or may not have lived in London during this period—so his portrayal of Rowe's reading of Le Queux (and others) is mediated by readers’ reading of Le Queux. The extent of this mediation varies according to readers’ familiarity with the Blitz as well as with Le Queux's work. Here, readers are the variable factors, though Greene embraces the uncertainty of such variables, using the act of reading in the novel to prime and shape those reading his novel. Indeed, the status accorded to reading in the novel allows the texts Rowe encounters to function as a form of intertextual ekphrasis by which both readers and protagonist are asked to connect what Genette would identify as the “thematic relationships” that exist between the text's different diegetic levels (Narrative 233).

How, then, might we characterize the interactions between levels of narrative and acts of reading, intertextuality, and paratext in The Ministry of Fear? The infrastructure of Genette's “narrative discourse” is not designed to discuss the effect these levels and their interrelationships have on the reader. Moreover, because of its focus on narrative and narrating, Genette's paradigm does not address the strategies of reading needed to untangle these relationships. We could extend his concept of “metalepsis,” which he defines as the “transition from one narrative level to another” that transcends the boundaries between “the world in which one tells” and “the world of which one tells,” to encompass transgressions between levels of reading (Narrative 234, 235, 236). However, in Greene's novel these transgressions are more than a mere slippage between reading the novel and reading in the novel, which implies a relationship of discrete yet overlapping layers. And, while it is tempting to apply the analogy of the palimpsest to these interactions within The Ministry of Fear, the component parts do not function as layers that have been superimposed upon each other, as is most evident in Rowe's apostrophe to his dead mother. Here, Rowe asserts his own readerly knowledge while trying equally to reconcile the changed world with the plot (both literal and figurative) against his life:

In such an instance, Genette's concept of “entanglement” helps to conceptualize the continual colliding between and intermittent obscuring of the novel's narrative levels, and acts of reading, intertextuality, and paratext as strategies of narrative entanglement.¹⁸ But while Rowe's familiarity with the structural conventions of spy fiction and its gen(r)ealogy eventually allows him to read his way out of the mire in which he finds himself, at this stage in the novel, he remains confused by this convergence of “life” with the “thrillers” he has read. For readers, further confusion arises from this metafictional turn in what has, until now, seemed a conventional thriller.

To disentangle the convergence of life and fiction (and in particular genre fiction), readers must learn to read The Ministry of Fear as Rowe does his own life at the novel's end. Building on Bakhtin's concept of “novelistic discourse” to characterize the different styles of discourse that must be separated out from the narration, this involves (to return to Lassner's metaphorical terminology) reading both with the grain and against the grain. As she explains, reading “with the grain” requires knowledge of the genre in which the novel participates, while reading “against the grain” relies on an understanding of the way in which the conventions of this genre are challenged or subverted (123). Although I see the adaptive potential that this hybrid mode of reading incorporating both methods (a deciphering) has for reading other texts that actively transgress the boundaries of genre or resist the classification of form, I focus here on examining how Rowe's familiarity with the conventions of spy fiction helps readers to mediate the novel's conventional and unconventional aspects, allowing them to decode the mixed signals being sent by the novel's many fictional modes—literary, spy, popular, satirical.

Greene demonstrates Rowe's ability to read across the boundaries of these fictional modes through his protagonist's familiarity with “the History of Contemporary Society,” a collection of books “in hundreds of volumes,” mostly “sold in cheap editions” (66). With clever, imaginary titles—“Death in Piccadilly, The Ambassador's Diamonds, The Theft of the Naval Papers, Diplomacy, Seven Days’ Leave, and The Four Just Men”—each entry in the collection displays a profound, if sardonic, awareness of the genre's publishing conventions (66).¹⁹ But the titles of these faux thrillers are more than mere generic allusions; they collapse the often arbitrary line between the “literary” and the “generic” or “conventional.” Unlike Rennit's appropriation from the vocabulary of literary criticism for commonplaces to describe the patterns in his cases, Rowe's recognition of the similarities between these novels and his situation does not merely reproduce his knowledge of fiction but extrapolates from it. Using the distinction that literary fiction “resembles life” whereas genre fiction “resembles only other novels,” Marina MacKay argues that instances where life and fiction converge on or inform one another actively subvert the boundaries “differentiat[ing] literary fiction from the genre novel” (“Interchapter” 144). In The Ministry of Fear, Rowe insists on reading his own life as a narrative so that it becomes more comprehensible, and Greene uses this aspect of his character's behavior to revise the trope of the indiscernibility of reality from fictions into a trope of life being more comprehensible in fictional terms. As I explore below, the hybrid mode of reading Greene proposes allows both protagonist and readers to engage with, if not disentangle, the novel's epistemological uncertainties.

Holistic Reading: Realizing “The Whole Man”

Rowe's dissatisfaction with Edwardian idylls and interwar arcadia arises from his readerly desire to engage with narratives that destabilize or diverge from the literary conventions Greene himself engages with in The Ministry of Fear. If “[t]he world has been remade by William Le Queux,” readerly expectations should adapt to these new circumstances. Rowe's realization that the adventure stories of his youth were unreal enables him to adapt his expectations and acknowledge his suspicion that he would be a better “detective writer” than a “detective.” Moreover, as the former, he would have far greater agency because he would be conceiving of rather than uncovering the plot.

Rowe's growing disaffection with the conventions of genre fiction culminate in the chapter “The Happy Man,” where he convalesces in a “shell-shock clinic in the country” (Greene 110) from temporary amnesia caused by a bomb blast in the city. He is told that he is Richard Digby, an identity that enables him to forget the Nazi plot he was trying to uncover and become what his personal history prevented him from being: ignorant and untroubled. While offering a form of sanctuary from the Blitz, the clinic contains clues about his past that can elucidate who he is and the circumstances that led to his hospitalization. The work of recovery Rowe undertakes anticipates the work of deciphering that the novel's readers must perform in order to work out Greene's entangled narrative. No one is who they seem to be and, out of context, even that which should be familiar seems strange: Johns, one of the clinic's attendants, is really Jones, the agent from Orthotex, “the Longest Established Private Inquiry Bureau in the Metropolis” (30), who went missing shortly after he was assigned to Rowe's case; Dr. Forester, the head of the clinic, also attended the séance where Rowe was wrongfully accused of stabbing Mr. Cost, the tailor sewing state secrets into suits; and Poole, the clinic's groundskeeper, is the same man who attempted to kill Rowe by lacing his tea with hyoscine so he could retrieve the microfilms hidden with the fête's prize cake.

Rowe becomes suspicious that things are not what they seem when he is visited by Anna Hilfe (the Austrian spy who falls in love with Rowe), who refers to him as Arthur instead of Digby. She hints that something is wrong but cannot say what; he is not “how [he] should have been” (119). However, his recovery is not brought about by extended convalescence, as the medical professionals around him insist, but by defying expectations. He must confront that which he finds most unsettling and perform a radical act of self-recovery that involves not only reading with the grain and against the grain but also between the lines. Thus, if Rowe's observation that “[t]he world has been remade by William Le Queux” signals the need for a hybrid mode of reading that combines the methods of deconstruction with those of hermeneutics, the emphasis on reading within Rowe's narrative as well as in Greene's novel invites a further reconfiguration of its readers so that they can disentangle the novelistic discourse underpinning Greene's strategies of entanglement.

Although Rowe's amnesia prevents him from accessing the necessary contextual information from his personal history to understand the significance of the clues surrounding him, he retains his ability to read between the lines. The preponderance of textual and paratextual clues emphasizes the importance of Rowe's readerly abilities for his re(dis)covery. Articles in the morning paper features stories about the existence of fifth columnists and record MPs’ questions in Parliament concerning plans that were “stolen from the Ministry of Home Security” (Greene 119–21). He notices the “rubbed-out pencil marks” beside passages expressing anti-nationalist sentiments in Dr. Forester's copy of Tolstoy's What I Believe (135). Dr. Forester and his staff go to great lengths to conceal an article in the paper about the missing Rowe being wanted by police for an interview: only his ostensible happiness distinguishes “Digby” from the “lean shabby clean-shaven man” in the photograph accompanying the article (143). Rowe is less advantaged when it comes to assembling the evidence from these diverse sources than attentive readers, but, while none of these clues are enough to raise his suspicion individually, they are disconcerting cumulatively. Investigating the off-limits sick bay, Rowe is haunted by “a feeling of sadness and disquiet and dangers he couldn't place . . . as though something were disappointing his expectations” (138). Without realizing it, Rowe is suffering from “weak closure,” a narrative strategy that typically affects readers of novels (or poems) but here infects readers within the novel's primary narrative.

Adapting Barbara Hernstein Smith's concept of “poetic closure” and applying Max Sternberg's model of “narrativity” to detective fiction, Segal proposes a model for understanding the narrative structure of detective and crime fiction in terms of the force narrative expectations and endings can exert on readers (154). In its focus on the narrative tension created between readers and the detective (or spy or amateur investigator), Segal's model for closure compliments Seed's earlier categorization of narrative expectation into those concerned with solving discrete crimes and those interested in discovering covert actions. However, the three primary types of closure Segal identifies as driving (or frustrating) narrative expectation—strong, weak, and open-ended—complicate Seed's binary because they exist on a “finely gradated and multidimensional continuum” and differently impact readers’ narrative expectations (Segal 162). Thus, though covert actions are discovered and discrete crimes solved in The Ministry of Fear, protagonist and readers alike are left at the novel's close with precisely the sort of deep epistemological uncertainty familiar to readers of late modernist fiction like Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1922), Djuna Barnes's Nightwood (1937), Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (1941), and Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day (1948)—the novel with which The Ministry of Fear is so often paired. This, I contend, is due to a “narrative ‘openness’” that, according to Segal, “results from significant gaps relating to the represented world that remain open—or at least not definitely closed—even at the end of a text” (162).

In Greene's novel, these “gaps” arise from the space between what the protagonist knows and what readers know; they are not sustained or widened through either suspense or curiosity but through the narrative's constant undermining of the certainty with which either readers or the protagonist know anything. While Rowe's thought process and deductions are available to readers and even though, at some points, his perspective is more limited than that of readers, each solution he arrives at, each discovery he makes, leads to further questions. His resolution of his narrative's central enigma—that of his own identity—takes the form of “retrospective patterning,”²⁰ enabling him to piece together the clues that allow him to recover himself as well as to recognize the subterfuge keeping him at the clinic. Once he regains access to the contextual information necessary to redetermine that something is not right, Rowe can uncover the covert plots (the “mummery” of the conspiracy he initially detected at the séance and the “expensive morality” play he suspected was being enacted “for his sole benefit” at the fête) that subtend his own narrative of the events leading up to his amnesia (Greene 58, 15). As the title of the novel's final part suggests, Rowe's discovery of the Hilfes’ betrayal is ultimately an act of self-recognition. He cannot realize the latter without exposing the former and, although these plots conclude in parallel, they leave the reader without the distinct feeling of closure.

How, then, can The Ministry of Fear be open-ended when the narrative closes with the identification of the fifth columnists and the thwarting of their plot? One possibility is to consider open endings as the product of stories with false and/or multiple solutions, which despite their association with postmodern works such as Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy are as old as detective fiction itself.²¹ The revelation that a solution is false or that a succession of possible (if not equally plausible) solutions exist “threatens the reader's certainty about the finality of any solution” (Segal 193). Greene does not present false or multiple solutions in the way Segal outlines but rather employs narrative devices associated with these forms of open-ended closure in modernist and late modernist writing, such as narrative fragmentation or the intercutting of different narratives (what Genette might classify as “metalepsis”), to supplement strategies of narrative entanglement that destabilize all knowledge. Moreover, the recurrence of this theme of epistemological uncertainty across multiple narrative levels throughout the novel is only evident through rereading.

Near the beginning of his re(dis)covery process, Rowe wonders whether “[t]he nursing home was something artificial, hidden in a garden” and whether “it [was] possible that ordinary life was like this” (Greene 138–39). As with his earlier realization about Le Queux, this epiphany impels him to assemble the clues around him—a task more characteristic of readers of detective fiction than of either a detective or a writer of detective fiction, as the equally amnesiac Johns suggests (121–22). Rowe penetrates the fiction of assembled identity (nationalism, enemy, collaborators) like an experienced reader of Le Queux, correctly identifying who has leaked the information and how. With the help of Mr. Prentice, a detective from Scotland Yard, he reveals the web of connections that drew him into the blackmailing plot initially and deciphers the uncanny experiences at the clinic as well as the hidden pattern of relationships between events and people concealed therein. In a moment of overt self-reflection, Rowe uses this web to reassemble himself: “He shut his eyes and thought of Poole, and an odd medley of impressions fought at the gateway of his unconsciousness to be let out: a book called The Little Duke and the word Naples—see Naples and die—and Poole again, Poole sitting crouched in a chair in a little dark dingy room eating cake, and Dr. Forester, Dr. Forester stooping over something dark and bleeding” (148). And yet, Rowe remains disoriented because his self-recovery is less a matter of solving clues than a case of deciphering the codes embedded in the novelistic discourse around him.

Writing on a similar instance of amnesia experienced by Albert Campion, the British double agent in Margery Allingham's Traitor's Purse (1940), Lassner remarks that “in his amnesiac state . . . [Campion] must learn how to spy on himself in order to detect the crime that threatens the nation from within” (118). He is in an “epistemological limbo,” but his freedom from his past identity and ideologies allows him to “navigate through an unknown personal, classed and political topography that conceals collaboration with the enemy” (118, 119). Rowe's amnesia is the result of a failed attack on his life perpetrated by those who seek to prevent his discovering the fifth columnists and undercover spies at work in Britain. In forgetting who he is and, more importantly, what crimes he has committed, he must no longer pretend to be an innocent member of society; ironically, this freedom from his shame and guilt enables him to recognize those who only appear to belong to the same community as he does. Rowe likens his self-recovery to “the horror of returning to life”—a life in which his childhood hero, the little Duke, is dead (Greene 148). It is fitting, then, that this recovery is brought about by his epiphany that nothing is what it seems, even fiction.

As Rowe's recovery progresses, neither his readerly knowledge of spy fiction conventions nor his attention to instances where fiction and real life seem to converge protect him from the epistemological uncertainties resulting from Le Queux's influence on fictional and historical espionage. In such instances, real life is very unlike fiction, for “none of the books of adventure one read as a boy had an unhappy ending” (Greene 176). Betrayed thusly by the conventions of genre fiction, Rowe is left with lingering epistemological uncertainty and the troubling moral ambiguity of the reality of life in wartime. If Rowe wanted life to resemble fiction (or the fictions of his youth), we might ask what sort of fictions his life resembles at the novel's close. For, in a frustratingly tautological way, the epistemological uncertainties in Rowe's life that result from Greene's troubling of genre fiction conventions also bring about that genre trouble. In other words, Greene tries to make his fiction just as uncertain as real life.

Reading as Disillusionment

Another possibility for the open-ended narrative in The Ministry of Fear relates to readers’ satisfaction (or lack thereof) with the novel's concluding scene, wherein Rowe returns to Anna Hilfe and the flat on Guildford Street following his confrontation with her brother at the “blacked-out” Paddington station during the air raid (211). There, “alone with the smell of disinfectant, the greyish basins, the little notices about venereal disease,” Rowe's “heroic” expectations about the espionage plot in which he has become entangled are subverted when this plot “reache[s] its conclusion in the Gentlemen's” (214). For Stewart, the closure Diemert identifies as signaled in “Hilfe's repetition of the phrase ‘Don't tell me the past, tell me future’” in this final confrontation (effectively bookending the novel's thriller plot) is actually the foundation of the novel's “romance plot” (“Auditory” 79). This romance plot is “structured around a central silence” (what lies unspoken between the past and the future), Stewart asserts (79), which evokes the stasis of Rowe's earlier acts of rereading in that it “creates a particular temporal conundrum from which [Rowe and Anna] cannot be free” (Pong). Petra Rau contends that, at the novel's close, “love becomes a form of doubling, through which those who love spies turn into spies too,” explaining that “love depends . . . on the loss of historical beginnings in the palimpsest of romance” (Rau 48, 49).

The extent of this interpenetration of the personal and the political becomes evident when Willi Hilfe eventually reveals the brutal truth about Rowe's crimes, in contravention to his sister's hopes that Rowe will stay the “happy” but ignorant man, and Rowe's thoughts immediately turn to the air raid going on over London, hoping that the bomb will obliterate locations from his happy past, places that “had to be destroyed before peace came” (Greene 217). Hilfe's suicide coincides with the sirens signaling “All Clear,” realigning Blitz fiction with Blitz reality so that Rowe can safely return to Anna. But before he can do so, he realizes that he has joined the “permanent staff” of the Ministry of Fear and can never fully live in the “All Clear” (220). With this final transgeneric gesture, Greene twists the spy fiction genre together with his anti-romance, yoking love together with fear. Just as the disillusioned spy loses all confidence in the institution employing her, so disillusioned lovers must become enemies who must “tread carefully for a lifetime, [to] never speak without thinking twice” (221). This disillusionment is crystallized in the epigraph to the chapter “Journey's End,” in which the little Duke's astonishment at being sent away from the King's court in Rouen to Normandy is expressed: “Must I—and all alone?” (Yonge 103; Greene 195) is transformed through our transgeneric reading into a statement elucidating both Rowe's ultimate solitude and our readerly dissatisfaction at the “narrative ‘openness’” effected by the novel's final ellipsis. In this way, reading (in) The Ministry of Fear can reveal that the troubling of genre in “high” modernism is also characteristic of some of the most important works of “low” popular forms such as spy fiction during the same period. Yet, in the latter, open-endedness and epistemological uncertainty seem to coexist with the pleasure of reading and indeed with a popularity that starts to disentangle the very binary between “high” and “low” established by the “modernist reading protocols” that disparage reading spy fiction.

This essay is the product of a long period of reflection as well as of precarity and would not be possible without Shelley King's incisive reading of an early draft; or Lara Choksey's and Nathan Waddell's respective assertions that this earlier iteration was, in fact, two distinct essays; or Michael Whitworth's generous direction toward Bakhtin and Orwell. At the same time, I am grateful for the insightful feedback I received from the anonymous reader as well as from Kevin McLaughlin, the editor of Novel, without which I could not have situated my argument about modernism's relationship with genre so precisely.

Notes

Works Cited