The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene

Published 1973

In the introduction to my Vintage edition of The Honorary Consul, Nicholas Shakespeare reports that in conversation he held with Graham Greene, Greene identified The Honorary Consul as his favorite work. (He identified The Heart of the Matter as his best.) After having read the The Honorary Consul, I can understand his selection. Greene set it in early 1970s Argentina and Paraguay, and it’s populated with discrete, well-developed characters caught in the swirl of revolutionary-reactionary politics, low-level diplomacy, and personal issues of faith, betrayal, love, and redemption. 

The central characters are Dr. Eduardo Plarr, a physician and the son of a British national and Paraguayan mother, and Charley Fortnum, the “honorary consul” of the title. A small band of rebels kidnap Fortnum, having mistaken him for the intended target, the American ambassador. Dr. Plarr, a sometime friend and later rival to Fortnum, becomes drawn into the affair through his past in Paraguay. A friend from his youth, who is a priest turned rebel, embroils Plarr in the ill-fated scheme. The events unfold in the world of Latin American politics that often mixes repressive reaction, doomed rebellion, and dumb inertia. Greene, as usual, captures this stew of persons, motives, and events. He ranges from the conversations of the rather hapless gang of rebels to the apathy of the diplomats who discuss Fortnum’s fate. In places, Greene’s dialogues would have made an excellent play (as his stories often converted easily to screenplays).

Graham Greene (1904-1991)

But with Greene, unlike, for instance, Ambler or Le Carre, there’s something more. The seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza was dubbed the “God-intoxicated man” by later generations. If Spinoza deserves that appellation, then we should dub Greene “the God-intoxicated author”, for once again, issues of God, faith, betrayal, love, and justice come to the forefront in the dialogues of his characters. As in The Power and the Glory (another among Greene’s best works), a wayward priest is near the center of the action and acts as a foil to his friend Dr. Plarr. Sometimes Greene’s dialogues seem almost too much, so weighty, yet he makes them work with his characters and their plight. Even the cynical feel compelled to offer justifications that draw them into dialogues about issues of good and evil. I won’t go into the content of these dialogues (which provide a stark contrast to those of the higher-ups), but they bear the burden of their weight and yet still allow the plot to advance to its stunning conclusion.

I suppose that it takes a certain type of reader to enjoy Graham Greene, and I’m not sure why I find his work so intriguing. Perhaps it’s because his works often deal with those on the edge, such as Brits in far-flung lands, remnants of a once mighty empire which now, by Greene’s time, has mostly fallen apart, often mirroring the disarray in the lives of his characters. And his novels are set in places marked by terrible economic and political injustices, such as Paraguay and Argentine, Haiti, West Africa, and Viet Nam. Persons in these places often can’t lead quiet, unburdened lives. Choices are real and the sins that may seem inconsequential elsewhere take on more serious repercussions in these liminal worlds. To venture into a Greene novel, such as this one, is to venture into a world where good and evil do not hide from sight, but instead parade through life in a confusing array of lives and acts.

The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham

It is the way and the Waygoer. It is the eternal road along which walk all beings, but no being made it, for itself is being. It is everything and nothing. From it all things spring, all things conform to it, and to it at last all things return. It is a square without angles, a sound which ears cannot hear, and an image without form. It is a vast net and though its meshes are as wide as the sea it lets nothing through. It is the sanctuary where all things find refuge. It is nowhere, but without looking out of the window you may see it. Desire not to desire, it teaches, and leave all things to take their course. He that humbles himself shall be preserved entire. He that bends shall be made straight. Failure is the foundation of success and success is the lurking-place of failure; but who can tell when the turning point will come? Who strives after tenderness can become even as a little child. Gentleness brings victory to him who attacks and safety to him who defends. Mighty is he who conquers himself.

I finally realized the long-held intention to read a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. The Painted Veil proved an excellent introduction. It is a novel about a vain young British woman in the 1920s, Kitty, who whimsically marries an intense, introverted physician, Walter. She follows him to Hong Kong, where she becomes embroiled in an affair. After discovering the affair, Walter takes Kitty to the interior of China where he works to defeat a cholera epidemic. The novel focuses on the education of Kitty through her relationships and through her observations of alien worlds.

Maugham is an older contemporary of Graham Greene, with whom he may be compared. Maugham began his writing career before the advent of the First World War and published his most acclaimed work, Of Human Bondage, in 1915. He continued publish well past the Second World War. Thus, The Painted Veil is a mid-career work for him. Like Greene and many British writers of their time, Maugham traveled a great deal and used his travels as settings for his novels (as well as writing travel books). In this work, set in Hong Kong and the Chinese interior, China becomes more of a stage prop than I would hope or expect, at least if written today. No Chinese characters receive any depth of portraiture. But since the story centers on Kitty and placement of her in the Chinese interior serves to isolate and alienate her from the much more Anglicized setting of Hong Kong. Indeed, the significant others for Kitty when she travels to the interior are Walter, a fellow Englishman, Waddington, and a group of French nuns, of whom the Mother Superior becomes an important figure for Kitty.

The novel grabbed my attention because it focused on Kitty, a vain young woman, who undergoes a variety of trials. It amazed me how well Maugham portrayed Kitty in her vanity and her struggles to come to terms with herself and her world. The men in this novel are enigmatic, as is the aloof and challenging Mother Superior of the local convent. But this allows us to share the perspective of Kitty, who must deal with these complicated Others.

I enjoyed this novel a good deal. While I would've liked to of seeing more of the China drawn into the story, that was not Maugham's primary intent, nor was it necessary to tell Kitty's story.

Above, I've included a quote delivered by Kitty's friend, Waddington, about the Tao. I find it an interesting quote, but this is about as deeply as Maugham ventures into Chinese culture.

Maugham once described himself as among the front row of second-tier writers. He's not among the avant-garde of the 20th century, and I think that Graham Greene has a greater, richer body of work. However, Maugham’s work, at least based on this sample, deserves recognition. Based on The Painted Veil, I look forward to reading other works by Maugham.

The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

During the War, with London threatened nightly by German bombers, a lonely man, Arthur Rowe, went to a small festival. He went into the fortune-teller’s tent and the turbaned lady gave him a winning tip on the wonderful homemade cake, a cake made with eggs. Thus begins what seems like a mundane tale. Of course, this is Graham Greene, and the main character Arthur Rowe isn’t just a lonely man, he’s a man with a past. Rowe awakens from his ongoing lethargy when someone later tries to get the cake away from him.

Greene wrote what he called “entertainments” as opposed to what he considered his more serious novels. The distinction that Greene makes about his works seems too abrupt. While The Ministry of Fear isn’t as weighty as its immediate predecessor, The Power & the Glory, or the book that follows it, The Heart of the Matter (considered two of Greene’s finest works), but it nevertheless has plenty of depth along with intrigue and thrills. Even in a mere “entertainment”, Greene touches upon love, pity, fear, and guilt. Greene provides quick but definitive sketches of the characters that play a minor role, while his main characters receive the depth of treatment of which he is capable.

When reading this book, I thought that it would have made a perfect Hitchcock movie. (Hitchcock and Greene were roughly peers, although I don’t know of Hitchcock ever making a movie from a Greene book or script.) Upon investigating, I did learn that Fritz Lang did make a movie of the book starring Ray Milland, released in 1944. (I could see Ralph Fiennes playing the lead today.) Greene’s novels work scene by scene and are so well etched that they do convert effectively to screenplays. (Two excellent Greene stories turned to screenplays—done by Greene himself—are The Third Man and The Fallen Idol, both directed by Carol Reed.) I couldn’t find a copy to download, but the reviews of the film seemed good, and I suspect it would convert well.

If you’re looking for a thriller-plus, you’d be hard pressed to find a better book. The Ministry of Fear strikes the right balance between intrigue and deeper themes. It’s another excellent adventure in Greeneland.

Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon

Author Joseph Kanon’s Istanbul Passage is a fine thriller, full of the intrigue of espionage and the attendant moral quandaries that the best writers in the field, Greene, Ambler, and Le Carre, do so well. Set in post-WWII Istanbul, the Second World War has only recently ended, but already the intrigues of the Cold War have commenced. Germany and Eastern Europe have unearthed not only Jewish refugees hoping for a secure future by passing to Palestine (then a British protectorate), but also war criminals, some of whom know things valuable to the U.S., the Soviets, and maybe even the Turks, who are caught between the two new superpowers.

The central character is an expatriate American businessman turned sometime spy. Leon Bauer is mostly a courier, but then on “one last mission” things go astray. Far astray. Now Leon, who speaks Turkish and knows his way around the famed city, must use wits and guile that he’d never had to use before to try to turn things toward . . . what? Leon isn’t just presented with issues of tactics, but some troubling moral questions, too. Whom is he helping? Who’s trying to get him? Why should he help a likely war criminal? Besides the atmospherics of Istanbul and Ottoman intrigue, Kanon keeps his readers wondering about what will happen next, whom to trust not to trust, and what Leon can do to preserve some sense of moral rectitude that we know that he seeks. 

#JLF 2013 speaker Kanon whom I heard in Durbar Hall. Thanks again, JLF!

I was a little reluctant about this book because I’d seen a film version of this book, The Good German which didn’t work for me (or many other viewers either, it seems). But while the film didn’t work for a variety of reasons, I know now how the book could. Kanon has staked out an era (the immediate post-war) that is fertile for intrigue and moral quandaries, much as Le Carre did with the Cold War and Alan Furst (with less moral tension) in the immediate pre-war and early war period. He’s worth another read.

News from Berlin by Otto de Kat

When I began News from Berlin I expected something along the lines of Alan Furst (whom I’ve enjoyed), but it turned out to be something slightly different and a bit richer, too. I read this book because de Kat participated in the Jaipur Literature Festival. I’m glad I did. 

Unlike Furst, who follows a central character through the perils of time immediately before and at the beginning of the Second World War, in this novel de Kat focuses on a family. The father is a Dutch diplomat in Switzerland, the wife volunteers at a hospital in London, and their adult daughter is married to a member of the German Foreign Ministry. The son-in-law is not a Nazi; in fact, he’s unsympathetic to the Nazi regime and certainly watched by the Gestapo. The novel begins in early June 1941. The war has begun. France fell quickly; Britain just barely survived. The U.S. remains officially on the sidelines while Hitler and Stalin have a non-aggression pact. For the family, life seems balanced if tenuous. But then the daughter passes on a secret to her father about a major German action coming soon. The knowledge becomes like an infectious disease passed (intentionally) from daughter to father to mother, endangering the thin tissue of each receiver’s existence and relationships without reducing (as hoped) the burden on the person passing  on the moral and practical demands that the secret requires of them.

De Kat’s focus, however, is more than espionage and the moral dilemmas of wartime. It also focuses on the members of the family, their relationships with each other and those closest to them. The delicate balance of relationships changes as each comes into contact with the other. New realities reveal themselves and confound the characters perhaps as much as their burdensome secret. History in the family, as in life, intrudes and shapes the present in ways that the characters can’t escape and can only vaguely comprehend. 

Writers like Graham Greene, Eric Amber (I’m now reading another Ambler), and Alan Furst have written a great deal set in this time period. While titanic military and political forces met in epic struggles, individuals and families—at least those lucky enough to live—continue to try to live and maintain a semblance of ordinary life when the time is not ordinary at all. To me, that's what makes this period so fruitful for novelists and historians (such as John Lukacs) and why I’m so drawn to it. Now I add Otto de Kat to the honor role of writers who explore this dark and frightening time not so long ago.

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

In Chennai, in perhaps the most organized bookstore that I’ve encountered in India, I came across Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, a novel that knew of but had never read. I’d see a screen adaptation with Michael Caine as the lead character Fowler, but other than imagining Caine as Fowler when reading the novel, I don’t have much recollection of the film or recall it having been compelling. But the book is compelling. 

Written between 1953 and 1955, as Indochina (Vietnam) slipped through the grasping fingers of the dying French Empire, the intrepid world-traveler Greene explored the world of the Vietnam, and in writing this novel he foreshadowed the upcoming American involvement. Greene brings America into Vietnam at this very early date in the person of a young man named Pyle. Pyle, fresh from Massachusetts, Harvard, and full of ideas from books, comes in to change Viet Nam, to change it so that it does not embrace the Communist Viet Minh and nor cling to the French colonialists. Pyle imports a belief in a “Third Way” toward “Democracy”. Pyle and Fowler, an older English journalist who is “not involved” in Vietnam but reports on it to his paper back in England, serve as anti-types of one another. Pyle exhibits the naiveté of the American mentality and Fowler the cynicism of the waning European empires. Between them, they also have the enigmatic young Vietnamese woman, Phuong, Fowler’s hope of love and comfort, whom Pyle falls for as well, with all of his youth and innocence. 

A trip to Greeneland finds men (mostly men) living on the edges of war and society, but for all of the searching, we find few heroes or villains. Instead, we find flawed, needy, and puzzled human beings, attending to everything from drink to women to God; sometimes with insight, sometimes in despair. Greene draws his readers into this world so that they feel the fear and uncertainty of his characters. 

However, I should add that while a sense of gloom or despair often mark Greene’s setting, he also displays gems of comedy and social caricature. Greene’s perceptions of Pyle and the other Americans poke a great deal of fun at us, but not without cause, I fear. These moments of levity help keep the reader from falling too deeply into the flawed world and characters that Greene features. 

Did any of the American decision-makers of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations read this novel before taking us so deeply into Vietnam? One wonders what might have happened if JFK had read this novel, or anyone in power with the perspective to see the perils into which we as a nation had ventured. We Americans have a lot of “Pyle” in us, or at least we did back then, when our government, full of adventurers and idealists, thought that it could change the world into our image for it. After Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, perhaps we’ve outgrown that perspective. I’m not sure, but I hope so. 

One can’t leave a Greene novel such as this one without a sense of human frailty and shortcoming and an immense compassion despite it all. If this is in some sense what Greene sought to achieve, then he was one of the most successful of novelists in the 20^th century. 

The Vintage Greene addition that I read includes an introduction written by Zadie Smith that I highly recommend.