Graham Greene, Javier Marias, and England’s Silence

Back when we were group reading Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marias, one of the salient topics was an actual campaign executed by Britain during World War II to avoid loose talk. The idea was that you should stay as quiet as possible, because 1) you never knew who just might be a fascist spy; and 2) even things that you might think were completely unrelated to the war could be useful by Nazi agents. Needless to say, this campaign was a frightening example of the kind of governing by fear that has been used throughout history to control populations. In Your Face Tomorrow, Marias paints the campaign in light of its “not-so-differentness” from what was being done in the fascist nations that Britain was at war with, as well as in light of the government/private surveillance that is now a common part of everyday life. He goes so far as to reproduce in the book itself a number of posters used in Britain to get the “don’t talk” message out.

For those interested in just how seriously Britain took this campaign, or interested in just how seriously Britain took the possibility of sedition (whether knowing or not) war on the home front, you might want to have a look at Graham Greene’s Ministry of Fear, published in 1943 (and made into a film by Fritz Lang in 1944). The book is largely about the culture of fear and repression brought to England during the Second World War, and in the novel Greene marshals the tropes of the noir genre to give the reader a feeling of self-censorship-via-uncertainty that must have been accurate to the atmosphere of Britain at the time.

Although the book’s bad guys are eventually found to be Axis agents, there’s enough uncertainly as to the nature of the enemy, and implication of British collusion with the repression, to give a definite sense that the British government is playing a highly repressive role here. Greene never explicitly mentions the campaign against talking, but he gets very close, and the general level of paranoia exhibited by the government vis a vis enemy infiltration gives a good sense of the kind of hysteria that would have led to such a campaign.

I found the book to be a good counterpoint to Your Face Tomorrow, not only for the historical aspect but also since Greene is a recognized master of the noir genre that Marias is tweaking and reshaping 50 years later in Your Face Tomorrow.

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