The Man Within, Graham Greene. Open Road Media (ISBN: 9781504054003), 2018 (First published in 1929).

Summary: Francis Andrews flight from smugglers he betrayed endangers a girl with whom he takes refuge.

This is Graham Greene’s first published novel. The main character is Francis Andrews, son of an abusive smuggler. When his father died, Carlyon, his second, took him under his wing in the smuggling business. But he never fits in, no more than he did with his father. Consequently, he writes a letter to customs officers, tipping them off to the smugglers’ whereabouts.. When the customs officers show up, Andrews escapes during the fight that ensues, leaving a customs officer dead.

A group of the men are taken into custody and face murder charges. But Carlyon escapes and is hunting Andrews, his former friend. During a foggy night, Andrews flees across the downs, knowing that if Carlyon finds him, Carlyon will kill him. Desperate, he seeks shelter in a cottage whose only inhabitant is a young woman, Elizabeth. Actually, when he arrives, he finds himself face to face with a corpse, a man who had been Elizabeth’s guardian after her own father died.

Elizabeth shelters him, passing him off as her brother to a nosy cleaning woman. When Andrews tries to leave, he nearly encounters Carlyon on the road and retreats to the cottage. Elizabeth hides him and Carlyon leaves. A bond forms between them. She doesn’t want to be alone. But she also senses the turmoil Andrews struggles with in what seems a cowardly betrayal. She urges him to go to the assizes where the men will be tried, to give his testimony. He does, although he makes a hash of it. Not only is his testimony compromised by the cleaning woman, who identifies him as staying with Elizabeth, who she calls “a loose woman.” He sleeps with another woman, who was a kind of bribe for his testimony. The smugglers are acquitted and Andrews is the object of opprobrium.

Elizabeth is also in jeopardy. Carlyon is on the loose as are the other men. They know she hid Andrews. And this exposes the central thread of the whole story. Andrews struggles with seeing himself as a coward, a legacy of his father’s abuse. He saw betraying the smugglers as a way to strike back, yet betrayal feels the ultimate cowardly act. Now, will he save his own skin, confirming what “the man within” has been saying? Or will he attempt to save Elizabeth? She acted in courage in her love for him. Will he? And what risks and consequences could this mean for them both.

In a sense, Greene offers us two people dealing with a person within, the voices of the dead they are seeking to live free of. Each is bereft when they meet the other, alone in the world. Each faces the question of “is love worth the risk?” In this first published work, Greene gives us characters we come to care for and explores large questions such as the line between cowardice and courage and the risks of love.