Set in a provincial Argentinean town, The Honorary
Consul takes place in that bleak country of exhausted
passion, betrayal, and absurd hope that Graham Greene has
explored so precisely in such novels as The Power and the
Glory and The Comedians.
On the far side of the
great, muddy river that separates the two countries lies
Paraguay, a brutal dictatorship shaken by sporadic
revolutionary activity; on the near side, a torpid city
whose only visible cultural institution is a brothel. The
foreigners of the city are refugees, each washed up on the
banks of the Paraná by some inner disaster or defeat: Dr.
Eduardo Plarr, a physician, whose English father has
vanished into a Paraguayan prison, and for whom "caring is
the only dangerous thing"; Humphries, a teacher of English,
who has touched bottom and accepted it; Charley Fortnum, the
Honorary Consul, who at the age of sixty-one, sustained by
drink and his disputed status as British Consul, still
retains enough hope and illusion to marry a twenty-year-old
girl from Señora Sanchez' brothel...
With gathering force,
Graham Greene draws his characters into the political chaos
that lies beneath the surface of South American life.
Fortnum is kidnapped by Paraguayan revolutionaries who have
mistaken him for the American Ambassador. Realizing their
error, they threaten to execute him anyway if their demands
are not met. Plarr, torn between his instinctive feeling for
the revolutionaries -- one of whom is an old friend -- and
his ambiguous relationship with Fortnum, whose wife he has
taken as a lover, becomes involved in a tragicomedy that
leads inexorably to a meaningless death.
At the center of
The Honorary Consul is Plarr, a brilliant Graham
Greene creation, perhaps the most moving and convincing
figure in his fiction. Plarr is a man so cut off from human
feeling, so puzzled by the emotional needs of men like
Fortnum, that he is paradoxically vulnerable, chillingly
exposed, and required in the end to pay with his life for
the illusions that other people believe in and that he
himself cannot share.
In the men and women who surround
Plarr -- Clara, who has moved from the brothel to Charley
Fortnum's bedroom; Father Rivas, the revolutionary priest
who dominates those near him, despite his unsanctified
marriage and belief in political terror; Saavedra, the
Argentinean novelist, whose work lugubriously mirrors the
world around him; Aquino, the poet-turned-revolutionary;
Colonel Perez, the cheerfully efficient chief of police --
Graham Greene has created a world peculiarly his own. It is
a world illuminated by that special passion for the
complexities of love, faith, compassion, and betrayal that
lies at the very heart of his work.
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