Virtues and vices of a young writer
Francis King
THE CAPTAIN AND THE ENEMY by Graham Greene
Reinhardt Books, £10.95, pp. 192
The obvious thing to say about Graham Greene's new novel, published in his mid- eighties, is that it is a typical old man's book; and one can think of at least one regular novel-reviewer who, if it falls into his hands, will say just that. But in many ways, so far from being a typical old man's book, it is a typical young man's one.
Its first youthful attribute is the freshness both of its writing and, even more impor- tant, of its vision of the world. There is no sense of pen-weariness, much less of world-weariness. Here is a novelist who takes equal delight in practising his craft and in observing, half amused and half rueful, the oddities of human behaviour.
Its second youthful attribute is the way in which so many of its themes, all fascinat- ing, are adumbrated but then fail to achieve the full development which one expects of them. There is the theme of love being allied to fear not of, but for, the beloved. There is the theme, recurrent in Greene's work, of compulsive betrayal and the guilt which follows it. There is the theme, equally recurrent in Greene's work, of intelligence agents of opposite sides being, in ridiculous or macabre fashion, parasites on each other.
Although the book consists of four parts, it in effect splits into a diptych, with the protagonist's journey to Central America as its hinge. We first meet this protagonist, Victor, as a 12-year-old, motherless schoolboy summoned by his headmaster to meet a mysterious stranger, the 'Captain' of the title. The headmaster believes this stranger to have merely come to take the boy out for the afternoon at the boy's father's request. But, in fact, the stranger has won the boy from the father — known as 'the Devil' — at either backgammon or chess (the two men argue about which) and now proposes to make off with him.
At this point the reader may jump to the conclusion that this Captain, kidnapping his little victim, is another Captain Grimes. But in fact he wants the boy not for himself (he has little interest in him) but for the childless woman, Liza, with whom he lives when not off on yet another of his myste- rious escapades. The Captain has always been prepared to steal to keep Liza happy, and he is now prepared to steal a boy if it is really a boy that she wants. Victor settles in with these foster-parents. At one point his real father, once Liza's lover, turns up, and at another point his aunt, his dead mother's sister. But neither is sufficiently concerned to reclaim him, and so he grows up, self-sufficient and cold, in this odd household. Except that the Captain him- self, seedy and deceitful, might be de- scribed as a typical inhabitant of Greene- land, this first half, in its adroit blending of fantasy and realism, is not typically Greene. Indeed, had someone read a page from it at random to me and asked me to guess the author, I should have opted either for V.S. Pritchett or for J. L. Carr.
The second half is far closer to the Greene we all know; and since, like the old-fashioned aeroplane eventually ac- quired by the Captain, it soars and dips over territory already familiar to us, it gives a less intense, because less surprising, pleasure than the first. Lured once again by the prospect of making money for Liza, the Captain has set off for Panama, from where he writes to her of the moment, always imminent, when his mule-train, laden with gold, will come home and the two of them will then live happily ever after. When Liza has been killed in an accident, Victor, now grown up and a journalist, sets off for Panama himself, to join the Captain — whom he describes as his real father to anyone whom he meets there. The Captain, it now transpires, is engaged in political intrigue involving in- surgency in Nicaragua; and it is here that the plot becomes altogether too perfunc- tory and opaque. There is a mysterious Mr Quigly, who is both an associate and also, since he is in the pay of the CIA, an enemy of the Captain. There is an equally myste- rious Colonel Martinez, a Panamanian playing a double, if not a triple, game. The Captain's death, in which he blows up his plane and so himself while attemp- ting to assassinate General Somoza by crashing into his bunker, is a typical Greene incident in the moral questions it poses. Here is a thief, liar and impostor; but here is also a hero. 'Will you be sure to know the good side from the bad, the Captain from the enemy?' the epigraph from George A. Birmingham asks. As so often in Greene's novels, it is the conven- tionally sinful man who, eventually, is found on the right side (i.e., in this case, that of the Sandanistas). It is also the conventionally unloving character who is eventually prepared to sacrifice everything for the one great love of his life.
It would be idle to claim this to be one of Greene's major novels. But its first half at least, at once tender and tough, shows a rare accomplishment. The rectitude of Victor, in his total indifference to the two people who have adopted him, is constant- ly contrasted with the roguery of the Captain, in his total love for his pathetic Liza. By the end, there is no doubt which of the two Greene prefers and which the reader prefers along with him. To be prepared to commit crimes for someone whom one loves is preferable to being so cold that one does nothing at all for anyone. Typically, when Victor's real mother dies, he feels no great shock of grief as he looks down on her corpse. When Liza dies, he records (the narrative is in the first person) no more than that `There was nothing left to do but bury her.' At the Captain's death, he feels the loss not of a foster-father but of the subject for a work of fiction and so of his vocation, such as it was, as a novelist.
It is good to find the best living writer not to have won the Nobel Prize still in such first-rate form.
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