The Captain and the Enemy

Graham Greene's "The Captain and the Enemy" is a touching meditation on love that is challenging because of its spareness and the tone in two acts. Among the last things Greene wrote, he has clearly pared this down to the minimum. In the first parts, Greene's stage is the familiar forgotten byways of depressed England, with characters that cling not so much to respectability but mere function in a notch above those on the public dole and in council flats. The story is a love triangle, but the mystery is all why, and perhaps even "if" there is real love. All the characters are flawed and warped, and the tale is narrated by a boy-child, who remembers but is not haunted by his mother's death, and also is strangely disaffected by his father's absence and near abandonment in a scruffy public school. He is almost sketched as a person without feelings, and has a tenuous attachment to filial duty: feelings being the romantic form of love, and duty being the mature form of love. Our no-wave anti-hero is plucked from this dull obscurity to go on an adventure writ small: an adventure simply because of its bizarre nature. He is "won" by a con-man and sometime associate of his father, and led away from school to live as the child of a broken woman in the basement of an abandoned Victorian home turned into unrented dead-end flats. His life with the woman, the comings and goings of his new foster father "The Captain" and the occasional appearance of his father, "the Devil" populate his memory in a diary he keeps. In the second part of the novel, the woman has died, and the child, now a young man on his own, travels to "Greeneland" the far-away dysfunctional half-colonized frontier land of Panama just before the transition to sovereignty. He must tell his absent foster father The Captain of her death, but cannot bring himself to do so until his own place in the The Captain's life is secured or defined. In this section there is both intrigue and mystery, dark dealings with spies, politics, money, possibly drugs, possibly guns, and a rickety plane. But the real underlying question remains the most pressing mystery: did this most dysfunctional of families made up of such broken people, ever love each other? Clever readers will see that Greene has once again woven Catholicism's deepest questions into the narrative, for the "family" mirrors The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, while "The Devil" -our narrator's real father- incarnates a fugitive and absent malevolence as each character gropes emotionally toward the other in an attempt to solidify a sense of themselves as loved, loveable, and capable of love. One of Greene's finest works, and profoundly moving.

I had read a few negative online reviews of this novel, had looked at the the cover (with King Kong standing there), and I had few hopes. I find the book a remarkable book---and just those qualities that some readers disliked were qualities which impressed me. The fact that some characters, most characters here, are not "fleshed out" is just right, for these people exist in a kind of spare landscape of slim hope and love, and they are no more attached to worldly things or even common social interaction, say, Ahab. As much as anything else here (and perhaps because the world depicted is somewhat vaguely suggested), we get the feel of Graham Greene's deep and mature consciousness, for in fact we are roaming around the inside of his mind more than around any landscape populated with Dickensian people (despite what one of the back-cover reviews says). Greene wrote this novel only three years before he died, and I found it a privilege to be in the company of his maturity, his encroaching despair, his sense of bleakness and crassness, all touched by hints of the power of love. It's a book that deserve more attention, and perhaps you need to be a bit older than younger to appreciate it.

One of the last novels by Graham Greene, "The Captain and the Enemy" was written in 1988, just three years before the death of the master. Although his prose is as always enjoyable, a little detached and sentimental at the same time, in the novel there seems to be an indication that Greene was aware of the shortcomings of the old age. The books is written in a form of a careless memoir with too many holes in it, no doubt intended ones, considering the contents, but now and then Greene ventures into the reflexive mode of general narration, and I couldn't help but have an impression that I listened to an old man's voice of admission. For a writer, it must not have been easy, but then Greene kept writing all his life, and virtually all of his literary heritage has been revered to this day; a wonder the man had never won the Nobel Prize for literature - another proof that one should not hold too much value in such awards. In a way, "The Captain and the Enemy" is full of contradictions, whether intended or not, but on the other hand, this small book incorporates all lifelong passions of Graham Greene, where yet again he touches the multidimensional subjects of interest from yet another viewpoint. The book starts in a humorous way, to quickly transform into a good-natured and intriguing story of a small boy whose life is one great patchwork, him not having a fixed place in the world, with all family connections never materializing themselves. The mother - dead as long as he remembers; the father, or 'The Devil' as everyone is fond of saying - loses the boy in chess, or was it backgammon? The boy never seems to unveil that mystery which no one bothers to tell him. Then there is the Captain, the winner of the game, whatever it was, and his woman, Lisa. As you shall see when you read the book, there is no other way to call her, but the woman. Never in the center of the storyline, although incredibly essential for one's understanding of the novel, Lisa enters the story as abruptly as she does exit, leaving us virtually scratching our heads. Such is the whole novel, in fact, full of mysteries, secrets, blanks spaces, only some of which shall be filled in eventually. One of the greatest strengths of the novel is the portrait of the pair, Lisa and the Captain. Although Greene takes infinite care to never really show us them both, or none of them separately for that matter, it seems to me that the key to understanding "The Captain and the Enemy" lies in letting go of the reader's routine, and the yearning for the full explanation, resolution of all threads, explanation one is used to be spoon-fed with. If you accept the fact that the story leaves much to you, all of those blanks to fill in, patchwork to sew together - you are already well-prepared. However, as much as the details are important, the key is to adopt the narrator's viewpoint, or better, the Captain's, if you dare. Why did they live apart from each other all their life, and why it seemed they love

This novel explores the universal human need to be loved and to be able to give love through the eyes of a lonely boy. The book does not make clear the nature of the relationship of the man (who is called "the Captain") and woman with whom he comes to live as a surrogate son. However, this lack of clarity become the focal point of the story. We, the readers, are invited to share boy's thoughts and feelings of not only the boy's perception of what this couple mean to each other, but also whether they love or even care for him. After all, the Captain is frequently absent and then, seemingly, abandons them. The boy even questions if he has ever been loved by anyone or if he is capable of loving another human being. Years later, when he travels to Central America to meet with the long absent Captain, he uncovers not only the type of work that kept the Captain so often away from home, but also how love and deep feelings for another person may exist without ever being expressed aloud. How sad that so many of us can only see this in retrospect, when it is too late.

Deep,elegant and sorrowful masterpiece.Never changing member of my "top ten novels list".