How does one distinguish between genre fiction and literary fiction, and how can one claim that a given book is both? "Literary" implies to me artful writing: language that is worthy of admiration even when taken out the context of its story. "Literary" also holds for me the implication of moral instruction or a deeper thematic or symbolic meaning of which the plot and characters are just a surface manifestation.

Another possible distinction between genre fiction and literary fiction, no less subjective, is that genre fiction is immersive. The language is transparent, and if it gets artful it is because the scene being described is especially intense. In the case of The Human Factor, the language is mostly barely noticeable and its transparency is disrupted only by an occasional clumsy metaphor, or when the characters discuss literature, at which point it seems that the author is using the characters as vehicles to deliver his own (irrelevant to the story) opinions on Tolstoy etcetera. (These characters deal with espionage, Apartheid, the cold war, life, death, and torture, and I can't believe they think that hard about books.)

Somewhere I heard that Graham Greene was a communist sympathizer. Without knowing anything about the man I chose this book from those available at my local used bookseller. (Could be that he has a bad reputation and I'm blowing my credibility by admitting to reading him but... too late.)

Here's my notes:

With a hand that is at first perfectly steady, he puts a very few pieces into play. We become the board and understand its relationships.

At the fulcrum of international intrigue is a man without loyalty or ideology. Communists to his left, imperialists to his right, moved only by uncomplicated romantic love, he breaks through Apartheid, trailing a wake of tangled consequences.

Layers of motives are revealed as a pool of circumstances is drained of its ambiguity.

Functional prose is flawed only by attempts at poetry, cumbersome and distracting metaphors like gaudy owl statuettes on a plain stone mantel.

This is a spy novel, readerly. Does it deviate from its genre? In one way: it is interesting, though not especially satisfying, that such well-paced suspense could end so anticlimactically, on such an ambiguous note. The resolution we stay awake to read never really arrives. Is this an intentional subversion of genre expectations?

Love loses, and the weather in Moscow is even drearier than that in London. And this, I think, is what the author wants to tell us about Soviet communism. It is grey, loveless, and a slow asphyxiation of the promise of revolution, just like the ending to this story is an indefinite suspension of the conflicts we expected would be resolved.