The titles of two of Greene's earliest novels, It's a Battlefield (1934) and England Made Me (1935), indicate preoccupations which remain central in his later fiction. In It's a Battlefield, a campaign to win a reprieve for a bus driver convicted of murdering a policeman involves a conflict between the Communist activists and the power of the State. But the Communist leader, Mr Surrogate, would like to see the bus driver hang, so that he can be used as a ‘martyr’ to the Communist cause. The metaphor of the battlefield, with its connotations of confusion and disorder, is indicative of Greene's subversive vision, his dislike of political parties (he was a member of the Communist Party for three weeks in 1924), and his belief in the necessity for the writer of retaining the freedom to change sides. Writing, which is a form of action, is engaged with the heat of the battle.

The inner lives of individuals can never be assumed from their external allegiances; and, as with the ironically named Surrogate, those who might be thought to be sympathetic because opposed to repression turn out to be as bad as the oppressors. From Greene's first novel, the man within lay at the centre of Greene's interest, partly as a result of those childhood pressures which turned him into a writer, and partly because, as artist, he never separated the emotional and reflective man, from the practical active man. The integration of these aspects of personality, or more often the individual's lack of success in integrating them, offers Greene away of projecting the individual and social turmoil of the mid-twentieth century.

With the very occasional exception, Greene regarded the politician as being amoral and corrupt because egoism, the desire for money and power, overcame the proper drive of politics, which should be ‘the greater good of all’. In the pamphlet J'accuse – the Darker Side of Nice (1982), Greene portrayed power as being in the hands not just of corrupt individuals, but of a criminal milieu, which included members of the judiciary and the police. Greene's exposure was prompted by the attempt to defend the daughter of his mistress from the violence of her husband and his associates.