I’m back to working through Graham Greene’s works and the last offering was The Human Element. This is a 1978 take of espionage set in dreary old England with flashbacks to South Africa. Greene famously divided his works into serious writing and “entertainments,” and while this falls into the latter category, it is still a page-turner and full of serious moments, but these are offset by frequent use of the usual British “compounding pile of absurdities” type of humor. This is Evelyn Waugh’s technique and it can be very effective. I’ve sometimes seen it described as “drawing-room humor,” and it’s…

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