Recommendations
Books Like The Confidential Agent
Best books to read after The Confidential Agent by Graham Greene
The Confidential Agent is Greene at his most compressed and most sympathetic — D., the reluctant Spanish republican spy who comes to England and discovers that decency is a liability in the world he has entered. If the novel's moral intelligence and its portrait of a man of principle in a world without principles moved you, these books share its concern with what political loyalty demands and what personal decency costs, its interest in the Spanish Civil War as a historical catastrophe, and its conviction that failure can be honorable.
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The Power and the Glory
by Graham Greene
The companion masterpiece — written simultaneously in the afternoons while Greene wrote The Confidential Agent in the mornings; the Catholic priest in revolutionary Mexico is the inverse of D. in England, succeeding spiritually where D. fails politically; the most important companion to understand what Greene was doing in the same creative period
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Homage to Catalonia
by George Orwell
Orwell's memoir of his service in the Spanish Civil War — the essential non-fiction companion; both are organized around the disillusionment that follows the encounter with the actual political reality of the war, and both portrait the experience of the Western intellectual who goes to Spain with ideals and leaves without them
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway's Spanish Civil War novel — the essential comparison in the American tradition; where D. is a failed academic who has lost his faith in people, Hemingway's Jordan is a true believer whose faith is tested but sustained; the contrast shows the American and British responses to the same political catastrophe
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The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
by John le Carré
The essential heir to The Confidential Agent in the British tradition — le Carré's portrait of Alec Leamas, whose faith in the West is destroyed by what he is asked to do for it; the direct development of what The Confidential Agent establishes about the moral costs of political loyalty
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Stamboul Train
by Graham Greene
The predecessor in Greene's entertainments — the Orient Express thriller that establishes the formula; the comparison shows how Greene's entertainments evolved from the train-journey structure to the full political-conspiracy structure of The Confidential Agent
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The Human Factor
by Graham Greene
Greene's final major espionage novel — Maurice Castle's double life organized around personal loyalty rather than political ideology; the most direct parallel in Greene's late work to The Confidential Agent's concern with what happens to a decent man who commits himself to a political cause he believes in
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Man's Hope
by André Malraux
Malraux's novel about the Spanish Civil War, written by a man who participated in it as a commander of the International Brigades — the essential French parallel to The Confidential Agent; both are organized around the gap between the idealism of the cause and the reality of the struggle, and both refuse to make the disillusionment the whole story
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A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway's World War I novel — the essential predecessor in the tradition of the novel about a man who enters a political conflict as a believer and leaves as a refugee from all belief; the comparison between The Confidential Agent and A Farewell to Arms shows how two very different writers use the same structure of political disillusionment
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