Issue 103, November 2025
ZOEB MATIN
It feels strange, sometimes, to realise how unprepared we had been, as school children, for the unceasing toil of work and duty that we would be chained to in our adulthood. A poem by William Henry Davies, a staple of our English syllabus, lamented that ‘What is this life, full of care? We have no time to stand and stare.’ Inevitably, it gave us the impression that a ‘life full of care’ surely meant a day full of studies and homework. We never realised then that at least we could enjoy all the leisure we were entitled to, and we were not yet aware of the worries, doubts and disappointments that would haunt even our painstakingly earned hours of rest and reflection in adulthood.
For a kind of escape from this ‘life full of care’, from anxiety about the marks that would be scrawled in red ink upon our examination sheets, we, or at least some of us, dove into books that took us far away from the seemingly endless monotony of lessons and examinations. When read, either during the time for tiffin, if borrowed from the library, or even secretly under the desk when copying down notes from the blackboard, they gave us the most lasting pleasure and even a draught of an otherworldly education that we drank up with much more zeal than what we could summon for our lessons. In them, one travelled to distant lands or even the centre of the Earth and told of boys who had not even been properly schooled and yet were whisked away on adventures full of peril where they could hold their own against men. One met adventurers, pirates, murderers and thieves; one also encountered invisible men, invading Martians, vampires and grotesque monsters. One followed these characters and their intrigues with so much imaginative relish that only the mythical characters of Fagin and Bill Sikes would, in their very sordid selves, seem unexpectedly real – they reminded one of some of the unpleasant cruelty and cunning that one found within the walls of the school and would find again in adulthood too.
And after the books, especially ones like Captains Courageous or Bligh’s account of the mutiny on HMS Bounty, it was the films that one watched at that age, of officers and gentlemen dispatched on daring missions behind enemy lines and of secret agents sent to beautiful lands to save the day, that also gave a first glimpse of how it felt to work like a man in an office. Inevitably, the films that chronicled the latter were the earliest of the James Bond films because, in them, all those ‘top-secret missions’, those blissful escapades into tropical islands and bustling cities on the other side of the world, even inside chambers of pyramids or villains’ lairs inside volcanoes, usually followed a meeting, or ‘briefing, with Bond’s boss named simply M; in that comfortably official room with its leathery baize door, his crisply elegant command – ‘Sit down, oo7’ – was the signal of something exciting to follow. For long, the memory of this recurring scene would play in the mind during those very dull hours in the neon-lit classroom; if other boys longed for a dusty and exhilarating game of football on the sandy playground, I longed for a chance, more elusive and even ironically suggestive of a punishment for some grave offence, to be summoned to the headmaster’s room – luxuriously cooled and as large as a classroom itself with cushioned armchairs that were more comfortable than the hard wood of our benches. The swarthy, rarely amiable features of our headmaster, wound up too tightly in his flawless white gown on formal occasions but otherwise dressed in a white bush shirt and cotton trousers blacker than his face, was hardly an equal to the quiet, even bemused dignity of M, as played by that always impressive actor Mr. Bernard Lee.
The reason for this lingering fantasy could be the fact that my father always travelled far and wide in his line of business and on his return, apart from toys, toffees and other mementos of his journeys (not to forget, the pirated prints of old war and spy films from Malaysian hawkers), he also regaled me with his experiences – the foreign businessmen he had met, the sights and sounds of those foreign lands and even the sumptuous meals served on Royal Doulton plates in the course of that business class flight. By contrast, in his office, it was only the ‘magic’ of photocopiers, whirring and clicking, and the rubber stamps with their inkpads, that made me forget the humdrum surroundings that paled in front of the chronicles of his travels.
More than fifteen years after that first glimpse of how an office actually looked, I found myself working in a company of brokers and like that child, was fascinated more by machines than by men or women. I found much amusement in the dispensers that noisily poured out hot tea, coffee, chocolate and even tomato soup in less than a minute. But this meagre measure of amusement was perhaps all that one could look forward to. Work, even in the busiest days, hardly amounted to anything significant or worthy of recognition and one counted the minutes, as in a school term a boy counts the weeks and days to his holidays, till the hour to leave arrived, leaving one more than a little exhausted and even disillusioned.
Into my fourth year as a working man, I began to read Graham Greene, an author whose works would now provide a kind of solace whenever and wherever life would become too difficult to reconcile oneself to. In the first ever novels, I found the most resonant reflection of my own despair and frustration in a world where work meant no success and dogged determination meant no dignity. I had left James Bond, with his suavely tailored suits and his secretly dangerous attaché case far behind in the realm of imagination. Instead, I found a sobering but comforting mirror image in the haunted and hunted Raven, with his shabby overcoat collar hiding his harelip, condemned by it to a never-ending life of hatred and hostility, pursuing his unscrupulous employer across the country – a hard, blunt but not inhuman object of revenge against a world too enormous and powerful against him.
‘A world too enormous and powerful’ … as I would sit every morning on the massive marble steps of the building which housed the office of the company where I had been employed, reading at a time a few more pages of how Raven was trying to hide from a relentless manhunt despite his incriminating disfigurement, I could not help but feel plagued by the same futile despair to conceal my capacity for error and prove myself worth of some nobility. But the day that unfolded was as dark as the Nottwich streets where Raven hid and prowled stealthily, even as it was lit by the almost hellish glare of neon. Every day, I dreaded the prospect of being spied upon and eventually caught at some insignificant error and thus condemned again to humiliation. No wonder, then, that, when also reading The Heart of the Matter at the same time, as Scobie felt unmistakably the unrelentingly suspicious gaze of Wilson, at his every movement, I too could understand just what he would have felt, like the Syrians themselves.
‘Wilson reports on all of us, Scobie. Fraser, Tod, Thimblerigg, myself. He thinks I’m too easy-going. It doesn’t matter though. Wright tears up his reports, and of course Wilson reports on him.’
A year before I started working in another company, I read The Human Factor, that brilliant and bleak portrait of burnt-out men of the Intelligence Service who find themselves questioning their morals and motives when a leak is detected. This novel was perhaps the most effective antidote to the fantastic allure of intelligence and stealth that Fleming and the films had filled us all with and it is intriguing to realise that Greene himself had intended his novel to be a deconstruction of the violence and glamour that was always associated with James Bond. Much before the tightly controlled, almost elegiac narrative has run its course, we get a first bitter taste of this palpable feeling of disappointment and betrayal, of all possibilities of romance or excitement, in this memorable exchange between Castle and Davis.
‘What about a Luger? I suppose you had a Luger. Or an explosive fountain pen?’
‘No. We’ve never been very James Bond minded here. I wasn’t allowed to carry a gun, and my only car was a second-hand Morris.’
‘We might at least have been given one Luger between us. It’s the age of terrorism.’
‘But we’ve got a scrambler,’ Castle said in the hope of soothing Davis.
That poor Davis is doomed to die, and even, in Castle’s bitter observation, to ‘escape’ from not only suspicion but also the unending monotony of his life, too contains the familiar ingredient of irony to be found in Greene’s fiction. As Alfred Jones, the protagonist of Doctor Fischer of Geneva reflects, just as he passes a reckless remark about his own employers – a chocolatier in Vevey – ‘Big business, like a secret service, demands loyalty from its employees more than honest’. And it is the recklessly honest and even loyal Davis, instead of the irresistibly devoted and disloyal Castle, who suffers death at the hand of his organisation.
As I read ‘Under the Garden’, first at home when we were all locked in during the pandemic and then, more than once in the dusty balcony of the office floor, whenever I sought to escape the pressures of demonstrating my half-hearted loyalty to the company, Javitt’s lesson to William Wilditch struck me with its stark resonance:
‘Be disloyal. It’s your duty to the human race. The human race needs to survive and it’s the loyal man who dies first from anxiety or a bullet or overwork.’
I tried in all these years to be as disloyal as possible but some ingrained sense of duty and responsibility for consequences always thwarted my most elaborate designs at deception. It stemmed in some measure from the sense of being always spied upon, like D in The Confidential Agent -a relentless paranoia that was rooted in distrust.
‘He wasn’t certain that he wasn’t watched at this moment; he wasn’t certain that it wasn’t right for him to be watched…. And the watcher – was he watched? He was haunted for a moment by an endless distrust.’
But these thoughts and reflections, I am afraid, might sound quite dark and I should also dwell on the more satirical side of Greene’s picture of this paranoia that is present in every profession, not least in the secret service, wherein vicious self-interest, as in any office of boardrooms and rows and desks, could be the only way to survive. How many times, when hearing some dreadful and arbitrary fate, as decided by authorities who conferred in some cushioned room, have we been rendered almost unimportant in the larger scheme of things? Who could not relate to Wormold’s anxious entreaty in Our Man in Havana when Hawthorne casually, almost cold-bloodedly, reveals the fate in store for him?
‘Please would you mind telling me how they are going to murder me? You see, it interests me personally…’
And of course, it goes without saying that there has been, in all these ten years, no escape from that most prescient and potent truth of all – of the inevitable failure marked out like a foretold destiny, to secure a promotion. A truth that Bertram in Loser Takes All understood all too well.
‘I was the assistant accountant (an ageing assistant accountant) and the very vastness of the place made promotion seem next to impossible. To be raised from the ground floor I would have to be a piece of sculpture myself.’
ZOEB MATIN