Published in 1943, THE MINISTRY OF FEAR by Graham Greene blends espionage and psychological mystery set in wartime London. The story follows Arthur Rowe, an ordinary man caught up in Nazi intrigue, navigating a world where nothing is as it seems. The story’s moral complexity redefined the boundaries of the mystery genre.
The title reflects the pervasive atmosphere of dread and paranoia in wartime Britain, where fear itself becomes a tool of control. The ministry of fear represents an institution or force that spreads fear to undermine trust and stability, both on a personal and societal level.
Once the police are involved, the “murky trail leads to a Thirty-Nine Steps type of organization and a microfilm” that must be found. (Tom Ruffles, The Joy of Mere Words)
It’s a page-turning thriller combined with psychological nuance, interesting characters, believable settings, and an exploration of what it means to be human. The Ministry of Fear was billed as an “entertainment” — much-needed escapism from wartime life. The “somewhat preposterous spy thriller [is] a dark analysis of personal responsibility, loss, and the obligations that go with love. (Tom Ruffles, The Joy of Mere Words)
Greeneland: the seedy, dangerous, and politically charged world of Greene’s novels. Greene believed the real world could often be more horrific than fiction. The term describes a milieu charged with existential or religious questions and implications.
Set in 943, the children’s adventure story by Charlotte Yonge concerns the young Duke of Normandy who must avenge his father’s death while keeping the King of France from absorbing his independent dukedom. The war that breaks out draws in the Danes and the young Duke’s Danish bodyguard. The young Duke eventually learns forgiveness towards his enemies, the French king’s sons.
Why is Rowe drawn to The Little Duke? How do explorers, heroes, and high ideals fit into the real world, where morality isn’t always clear?
“A bomb early in the blitz had fallen in the middle of the street and blasted both sides, but Rowe stayed on. Houses went overnight, but [Arthur Rowe] stayed.”
“Far away on the outskirts of London the sirens began their nightly wail … Somewhere two miles above their heads an enemy bomber came up from the estuary.”
The sirens sounded the All Clear. “Nobody moved to go home: this was their home now. They were quite accustomed to sleeping underground …. This was the world they knew.”
“The night raid … had been on a small scale. A number of bombs had been dropped, and there had been a number of casualties, some of them fatal. The morning communiqué was like the closing ritual of a midnight Mass. The sacrifice was complete and the papers pronounced in calm invariable words the ‘Ite Missa Est.’” (“Go, the mass is ended.”)
“Through the blacked-out station the season-ticket holders were making a quick get-away from the nightly death; they dived in earnest silence towards the suburban trains, … and the porters stood and watched them go with an air of sceptical superiority. They felt the pride of being a legitimate objective: the pride of people who stayed.”
How does the setting of The Ministry of Fear during the Blitz contribute to the story? How does the novel reflect the anxieties and uncertainties of wartime Britain?
“Even if Rowe is guilty, what is an individual homicide … when mass-murder is being carried out on a state-organised industrial scale?” (Tom Ruffles, The Joy of Mere Words)
People who live through the raids may suffer from “Blitz anxiety” — suspended between the memory of previous devastation and anticipatory dread of a future bombardment.
“The awful thing about a raid is that it goes on: your own private disaster may happen early, but the raid doesn’t stop.”
The papers don’t mention a murder at a séance: “nobody troubled about single deaths.”
Davis says, “‘You had no right to bring me into this.’” Prentice says, ‘Nobody’s got a right to his life these days. My dear chap, you are conscripted for your country.’”
It shows a desire for autonomy and ownership in a world where he often feels powerless.
His defiance reveals a longing for normalcy, moral clarity, and the small victories of life.
Suffering and Pity
Mr. Prentice says “Pity is a terrible thing.” Pity traps us in a cycle of suffering without the hope of moving on. Love may be transient, but pity endures.
“People could always get things out of him by wanting them enough; it broke his precarious calm to feel that people suffered. Then he would do anything for them.”
“Rowe wished he could get away [from the man feeding birds]; but … the sense of pity worked and he stayed.” The man asks Rowe to help him deliver gardening books to a buyer. “Rowe had agreed to nothing, but he knew there was no choice; he hadn’t the hard strength of mind to walk away and leave the little man to drag his own burden.”
How much does suffering or our desire to eliminate suffering shape our life choices?
What is the novel’s point about compassion and pity?
A voice would whisper, ‘You say you killed for pity; why don’t you have pity on yourself?’ Why not indeed? except that it is easier to kill someone you love than to kill yourself.
He told himself “it was he who had not been able to bear his wife’s pain—and not she.”
“The law had taken a merciful view: himself he took the merciless one. Perhaps if they had hanged him he would have found excuses for himself between the trap-door and the bottom of the drop, but they had given him a lifetime to analyse his motives in.”
Mr. Cost has been stabbed with Rowe’s knife. “It occurred to Rowe that he had not said one word to defend himself: the sense of guilt for a different crime stopped his mouth.”
Rowe “wasn’t going to remain permanently in hiding for a crime he hadn’t committed, while the real criminals got away.” “If he killed himself it would be for a crime of which he was guilty. He was haunted by a primitive idea of Justice.”
Anna: “I have seen so many bad people where I come from, and you don’t fit … You worry too much about what’s over and done. … Don’t think so much. Give yourself a chance.”
At the end, Rowe runs into Henry Wilcox. ‘You brood too much,’ Henry said. ‘A thing that’s done is done,’ and he looked quite brightly up the road the procession had taken.
Is Rowe’s sense of guilt justified? Does The Ministry of Fear hold him accountable for Alice’s death?
Have you ever been haunted by guilt for something that happened in the past?
“The fête called [Arthur Rowe] like innocence: it was entangled in childhood, with vicarage gardens and girls in white summer frocks and the smell of herbaceous borders and security. [He] stepped joyfully back into adolescence, into childhood.”
He wanted “to mislay the events of twenty years.”
Rowe: “Don’t tell me the past; tell me the future.” Mrs. Bellairs tells him the cake’s weight.
He read “The Old Curiosity Shop and David Copperfield [as people read] the Bible, over and over again till he could have quoted chapter and verse, not so much because he liked them as because he had read them as a child, and they carried no adult memories.”
The “immeasurable emptiness of the week ahead stretched before him. … Perhaps if every street with which he had associations were destroyed, he would be free to go …. After a raid he used to sally out and note with a kind of hope that this restaurant or that shop existed no longer—it was like loosening the bars of a prison cell one by one.”
Why is it so hard for Rowe to tell friends from enemies in The Ministry of Fear? Why does he trust Willi and Anna?
It’s “impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself. For more than a year now Rowe had been so imprisoned—there had been no change of cell, no exercise-yard, no unfamiliar warder to break the monotony of solitary confinement. A moment comes to a man when a prison-break must be made whatever the risk. Now cautiously he tried for freedom.”
Rennit: “This is a respectable business with a tradition. I’m not Sherlock Holmes. You don’t expect to find [me] crawling about floors with a microscope looking for blood-stains?”
Rennit: “Life, you know, isn’t like a detective story. Murderers are rare people to meet. They belong to a class of their own. … They are very, very seldom … what we call gentlemen. Outside of story-books. You might say that they belong to the lower orders.”
‘Perhaps,’ Rowe said, ‘I ought to tell you that I am a murderer myself.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought twice about [Poole’s visit and the bombing],’ Rowe said, ‘if it hadn’t been for the taste the tea had.” The tea was poisoned with hyoscine.
Willi: “Your old-fashioned murderer killed from fear, from hate—or even from love … None of these reasons is quite—respectable. But to murder for position—that’s different, because when you’ve gained the position nobody has a right to criticize the means. Nobody will refuse to meet you if the position’s high enough. Think of how many of your statesmen have shaken hands with Hitler.”
Anna lacked Willi’s “charm and ease; the experience which had given him [a] nihilistic abandon had left her brooding on some deeper, more unhappy level. He felt no longer sure that they were both without scars. Her brother had the ideas, but she felt them.”
Rowe wanders through a maze. He finds Anna. “Life hadn’t been able to break her. All it had done was to put a few wrinkles round eyes as straightforward as a child’s.”
“He had the impression that she didn’t tell lies. She might have a hundred vices, but not the commonest one of all.” He realizes “he could be of use to someone again.”
“Conventions were far more rooted than morality; [Rowe] found that it was easier to allow oneself to be murdered than to break up a social gathering.”
“How could you go on living with a man if you had once asked him whether he had put poison into your evening drink? Far easier when you love him and are tired of pain just to take the hot milk and sleep. … He would have liked to stay beside her till she slept, but that would have been unusual, and he must avoid anything unusual, so he had to leave her to die alone. … Convention held them at the moment of death.”
He “wanted to shout to [Willi] for help, but convention held him as firmly as Cost’s hand.”
The Little Duke: “They came to a great forest, which seemed to have no path through it.”
Rowe’s dream: “Tea on the lawn, evensong, croquet. … People write about it as if it still went on; lady novelists describe it …, but it’s not there any more.”
Rowe’s dream: “The dog caught a rat and tossed it, and the rat tried to crawl away with a broken back … Suddenly he couldn’t bear the sight of the rat’s pain any more; he picked up a cricket-bat and struck the rat on the head over and over again.”
Nowhere to turn, Rowe visits Henry Wilcox. Henry’s wife has died. “People say that sorrow ages, but just as often sorrow makes a man younger—ridding him of responsibility, giving in its place the lost unanchored look of adolescence.”
Henry’s wife died playing hockey. Henry: “‘You know how it is … ‘I killed my wife too. I could have held her, knocked her down …’
Digby remembers his life until age 18, experiencing “inexplicable happiness as if he had been relieved suddenly of some terrible responsibility.”
He was fond of books on exploration (Stanley, Baker, Livingstone, Burton) “but there doesn’t seem much opportunity for explorers nowadays.”
Johns: It’s [better] that the memory should return of itself—gently and naturally. It’s like a film in a hypo bath … The development will come out in patches.’”
Anna: “‘Your hair is much greyer. … And yet you look so much younger … happier.’” He’s sorry he can’t remember her. “‘Don’t be sorry,’ she said with strange ferocity. ‘Never be sorry again.’”
“‘There—she seemed to indicate the whole external world beyond the garden wall—‘you weren’t happy. I would do anything to keep you happy. This is how you should be.’”
Rowe “had the blind passionate innocence of a boy: like a boy he was driven relentlessly towards inevitable suffering, loss and despair, and called it happiness.”
In The Ministry of Fear, Tolstoy’s What I Believe is on the bookcase at the clinic. Tolstoy said one of the causes of conflict (inequality and discontent) in the Western world was the importance attached to state government, law, ownership of property and possessions, trade, and love of country.
Tolstoy: ‘Remembering all the evil I have done, suffered and seen resulting from the enmity of nations, it’s clear to me that the cause of it all lay in the gross fraud called patriotism… As long as we praise patriotism, and cultivate it in young people, there will be armaments which destroy physical and spiritual life, and there will be vast, awful wars.’
Rowe thinks Tolstoy was “too busy saving his own soul. Wasn’t it better to take part even in the crimes of people you loved, if it was necessary hate as they did, and if that were the end of everything suffer damnation with them, rather than be saved alone?”
This reasoning “excused anyone who loved enough to kill or be killed.” “There was the point—not to kill for one’s own sake. But for the sake of people you loved, and in the company of people you loved, it was right to risk damnation.”
“If Dr Forester had not so inefficiently rubbed out the pencil-marks in the margins of Tolstoy’s What I Believe, Mr Rennit might never have learnt what had happened to Jones, Johns would have remained a hero-worshipper, and it is possible that Major Stone would have slowly wilted into further depths of insanity …. And Digby? Digby might have remained Digby.”
“For it was the rubbed-out pencil-marks which kept Digby awake and brooding … You couldn’t respect a man who dared not hold his opinions openly, and when respect for Dr Forester was gone, … The noble old face became less convincing: even his qualifications became questionable. What right had he to forbid the newspapers [and] the visits of Anna Hilfe?”
Digby heads to the sick bay. Stone is in a straitjacket. He tells Stone he’s not mad and says he’ll come back for him. “A terrible sense of pity moved him; he felt capable of murder for the release of that gentle tormented creature.”
How does Digby’s encounter with Major Stone influence his character development in The Ministry of Fear?
Dr. Forester: Life “had become too much for [Conway]—and loss of memory was his escape. I tried to make him strong, to stiffen his resistance, so that when his memory came back, he would be able to meet his very difficult situation. … I was very patient—he was unbearably impertinent. But I’m human, Digby, and one day I lost my temper. … I told Conway everything, and he killed himself that night.’” Forester then tells Digby he’s a murderer.
Rowe “remembered the pencil-marks in the Tolstoy rubbed out by a man without the courage of his opinions and that heartened him.”
“He was Arthur Rowe with a difference. He was next door to his own youth.
‘I’m not Conway—and I won’t be Stone. I’ve escaped for long enough: my brain will stand it.’ [He felt] the untried courage and the chivalry of adolescence. He was no longer too old and too habit-ridden to start again.”
He repeats, “‘I must stand up,’ as though there were some healing virtue in simply remaining on his feet while his brain reeled with the horror of returning life.”
“Rowe repressed for the sake of [Prentice] a sense of exhilaration: he was happily drunk with danger and action. This was more like the life he had imagined years ago. … He didn’t understand suffering because he had forgotten that he had ever suffered.”
“He thought of Digby now as a stranger—a rather gross, complacent, parasitic stranger whose happiness had lain in too great an ignorance. Happiness should always be qualified by a knowledge of misery.” (John Milton used the Fall of Man to explore how suffering leads to a deeper appreciation of goodness and a higher form of happiness.)
Ford dials BAT271. Rowe can’t see the last number. Rowe doesn’t tell Prentice. “He wanted to boast like a boy to Anna—‘I did it.’” Yet he’s growing up: “every hour was bringing him nearer to … his real age.”
At a phone box, Rowe dials possible numbers until Anna answers. He sees her. She’s anxious that his memory might have returned. She’s grateful that it hasn’t.
Willi sleeps holding Sonnets to Orpheus (Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875-1926). The Orpheus stories center on his ability to charm all living things (and even stones) with his music, his attempt to retrieve his wife Eurydice from the underworld, and his death at the hands of the maenads of Dionysus, who got tired of his mourning for his late wife.
Anna wants to hide the truth from Rowe. Willi: “She doesn’t want you to hear, does she? Doesn’t that make you curious? She wants you as you are, you see, and not as you were.”
“Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done; it isn’t being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love—it’s being unhappy together.”
Hilfe tells Rowe about his wife. Rowe “couldn’t escape now: the lost years waited for him among the wash-basins.” Hilfe laughs and says he poisoned his wife, “Your Alice.”
“He thought: what will that bomb destroy? Perhaps with a little luck the flower shop will be gone near Marble Arch, the sherry bar in Adelaide Crescent, or the corner of Quebec Street … there was such a lot which had to be destroyed before peace came.”
Johns: “There’s another kind of Fifth Column [those who engaged in espionage to support the enemy and undermine the war effort from within]. People who are blackmailed. It’s a kind of Ministry of Fear. … It’s the general atmosphere they spread, so that you can’t depend on a soul.”
One can go back to one’s own home after a year’s absence and … it is as if one has never been away. Or one can go back after a few hours and everything is so changed that one is a stranger.
… He had hoped that wherever Anna was there would be peace; coming up the stairs a second time he knew that there would never be peace again while they lived.
Rowe thought about the Ministry of Fear. “He felt now that he had joined its permanent staff. But it wasn’t the small Ministry to which Johns had referred, with limited aims like winning a war …. It was a Ministry as large as life to which all who loved belonged. If one loved one feared.
What is “the horrible process of connection” (218)? What is the “ministry of fear”?
In Book I of Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude, he recalls when he “grew up/Fostered alike by beauty and by fear”—a dual “ministry” performed for him by Nature.
“Already he was beginning painfully to think out the long chain of deceit he would have to practise on Mr Prentice if he were to save Anna.”
She “had been crying, and her face looked as despairing as a child’s. He felt an enormous love for her, enormous tenderness, the need to protect her at any cost. She had wanted him innocent and happy … He had got to give her what she wanted.”
Rowe says Willi was dead when he found him: “He was pledging both of them to a lifetime of lies, but only he knew that.”
After so much emphasis on heroes and explorers, why is the climax of The Ministry of Fear so unheroic? Has Rowe grown up at last? Why does he lie to Anna at the end?
“They sat for a long while without moving and without speaking; they were on the edge of their ordeal, like two explorers who see at last from the summit of the range the enormous dangerous plain. They had to tread carefully for a lifetime, never speak without thinking twice; they must watch each other like enemies because they loved each other so much. … It occurred to him that perhaps after all one could atone even to the dead if one suffered for the living enough.”
What does the final exchange between Arthur and Anna reveal about their future together?
What’s the relationship between love/happiness and suffering? Why does the novel end with a meditation on atoning for the dead? Is the ending optimistic or pessimistic?
“I wish now that the espionage element had been less fantastically handled, though I think Mr. Prentice of the Special Branch is real enough—I knew him under another name in my own organization when I was his pupil. The scenes in the mental clinic are to my mind the best in the novel, and it was surprising to me that Fritz Lang … omitted them altogether from his film version of The Ministry of Fear, thus making the whole story meaningless.”—Ways of Escape: An Autobiography
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We’re discussing seminal works by Edgar Allan Poe (Auguste Dupin), Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes), Wilkie Collins, Dorothy L. Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey), Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple), Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe), and Dashiell Hammett, as well as The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene.
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