Ministry of Fear starts in The Thirty-Nine Steps territory, with the amateur hero blundering into an enemy spy plot and being forced on the run, pursued by the conspirators and the police, and so far so good, with his character deepening as we discover how having assisted his wife’s euthanasia has left him guilty and depressed. That afternoon he meets a man who asks him to take a case full of books to a hotel. At the hotel, he’s escorted to a room where Anna is waiting. It’s a trap and a bomb in the case explodes. The Happy Man

Graham Greene: The Ministry of Fear - London Fictions Graham Greene: The Ministry of Fear - London Fictions

Rowe contemplates suicide, but meets a man who asks him to take some books to a hotel. At the hotel he finds Anna and a bomb in the case explodes. When Rowe regains consciousness, he has amnesia. The nurses tell him his name is Richard Digby, but Anna visits and calls him "Arthur". Rowe starts to fall in love with Anna. Winston Smith, the main character of the novel, works at the Ministry of Truth. [5] It is an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete rising 300 metres (980ft) into the air, containing over 3000 rooms above ground. On the outside wall are the three slogans of the Party: "WAR IS PEACE," "FREEDOM IS SLAVERY," and "IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH." There is also a large part underground, probably containing huge incinerators where documents are destroyed after they are put down memory holes. For his description, Orwell was inspired by the Senate House at the University of London. [6] Role in information [ edit ]Concerned that someone tried to kill him, Rowe goes to the charity who ran the fête. There he meets Anna Hilfe, and her brother Willi, who are Austrian refugees. Things have changed in the two months he has been someone else. Not all of his memories have returned so he is not even a complete Arthur Rowe yet. The Twins, remember the twins, well they are not who he thought they were either. it wasn’t only evil men who did these things. Courage smashes a cathedral, endurance lets a city starve, pity kills . . . we are trapped and betrayed by our virtues.” War-time military intelligence mission? - Yes Who's the terrorist enemy here? - nazis! Search for technology? - state secrets Amnesia story? - Yes Main Character Gender - Male The Ministry of Fear is a third-person narrative largely focused through Rowe’s consciousness but often offering a more articulate and general commentary than he would himself be likely to provide, at least in his current psychological condition. He is a middle-aged former journalist who suffers from an overwhelming sense of pity that led him to administer a lethal dose of hyoscine to his terminally ill wife, Alice. He told the police what he had done and fully expected to be tried, convicted of murder and hanged; but the court took a lenient view and he was sent to a secure asylum from which he has now been set free.

The Ministry of Fear - Wikipedia

It is significant that the novel opens in Bloomsbury, a place associated, through the Bloomsbury Group, with pacifism (at least in World War One), with élite art and attitudes and with the Modernist writing of Virginia Woolf, all of which, especially the last, Greene’s work, here as elsewhere, challenges. In a way that might seem to measure the Bloomsbury Group’s limits, the area now bears the scars of bombing, with an interior that might have figured in a Vanessa Bell painting ignominiously exposed to public view: This book was published in 1943 and, in it, Graham Greene paints an evocative picture of a war weary population. Arthur Rowe is bombed more than once during the novel and many of the people he comes across have a furtive, nervous air about them. London has been reduced to almost a series of small villages, with people having to consider whether or not they have time to cross the city before the sirens go. However, the blitz is not the only problem Arthur Rowe faces. He finds that he possesses something that the Germans want and they will use any means to acquire it. In fear of his life, Rowe tries to investigate the organisers of the fete and meets Anna Hilfe and her brother Willi; Austrian refugees, who seem to believe his outlandish story.The film omits all of Rowe's incarceration in Dr Forester's private asylum with amnesia, after the bomb in the booby-trapped case of books explodes. Gradually he works out that the institution is run by Nazi agents and that inmates who find out too much are eliminated. Painful though it is to regain his memories, he realises that he must remember all he can and get out to inform the police. I felt Ministry of Fear fell a little between two stools. It seemed unsure whether it wanted to be. Was it a literary novel about identity and how guilt and the past make happiness in the present impossible? Or was it a spy thriller? As such, it’s very uneven. It’s 1941, during the period of heavy German air-raids on London known as the Blitz. Arthur Rowe is guilty and depressed about the death of his wife, who he killed as she had a terminal illness.