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The Captain and the Enemy

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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 loved each other dearly, although there's never any real sign of it? Greene was capable of writing a great love story without having his characters ever mention the subject, nor mouth the four-letter word themselves, for that matter. So far away, and so close.

"I brought up the forbidden word. 'Does he love you?'

'Oh, love. They are always saying God loves us. If that's love, I'd rather have a bit of kindness'" [p. 84]

I finished this four-part novel in one day. At first I enjoyed it immensely, but as I read on, I had more and more trouble understanding its real meaning. As the book progresses, we change the scenery and land in Panama of the late 70s, where another part of the Captain's life is revealed, and the book adopts the flavor of an espionage thriller. As I closed the book, I had mixed emotions, and needed to air my head a bit to at least attempt to grasp the full meaning of this novel. Good literature makes you think, and that we can't deny Greene. His novels slowly grow on you, and leave a long-lasting impression and a desire to come back, one day. Which I shall do, and I wish you the same, dear reader.

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.

This novel explores the universal human need to be loved and to give love through the eyes of a young 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.

This is a minor novel by Greene, although his major themes are here. It was his last and the feeling that prevails is the loneliness of life, the feeling of being a permanent outsider. Victor is the son of a cruel man and a deceased mother, miserably living in boarding school. On his twelfth birthday, instead of his father a complete stranger shows up to pick him up and take him to lunch and maybe a movie. But instead of returning the boy, the stranger, known only as "The Captain", tells him he has won him at backgammon, and proposes him to go and live in London. Hating boarding school, Victor decides to go to London, where he is placed in a young woman's apartment, to live there as a kind of stepson. The woman is the occasional mistress of the Captain and former lover of Victor's father. Victor adopts the new name of Jim. The Captain, who is obviously a criminal, appears at increasingly longer intervals. In the meantime, Jim and the woman, Liza, develop a kind of mother-and-son relationship. Eventually Jim grows up and becomes a journalist. When the woman dies, Jim looks for the Captain and finds out he is living in Panama, where he travels to meet him. There he discovers the Captain is involved in drug-dealing.

Although this is not at the level of Greene's masterpieces, it is an interesting one to read, because Greene's obsessions are present in a haunting way: moral dilemmas, solitude, the strange relationships we develop with the people our fate brings us close to. Worth a try.

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.

Publishers reprinting an author's entire opus are always claiming obscure works have been unfairly overlooked. In the case of "The Captain and the Enemy," that is surely true. Any reader will find all sorts of intrigues in this little-known work. But even for a Greene fan, like me, this was something of a revelation--one also made possible through the brilliant introduction by John Auchard. You'll gain more insight into a complex author from this short novel and new introduction than from three volumnes of most biographies. DGibson from Brooklyn.

One of the most unusual Graham Greene books, The Captain and the Enemy is a concise read with many mysteries and questions. From the beginning we read about a young man being abused by fellow classmates who is whisked away by a man we know as The Captain. We learn he was won in game of either backgammon or chess (we are never sure which) by The Captain against his father who is known as The Devil. Adopted by The Captain's friend and sometime lover Liza, the boy's name changes and he is reared primarly by Liza.

In and out of their lives, we get hints of criminal activity by The Captain in spite of what also seems to be several redeeming character traits. Liza obviously loves The Captain as well as the boy and lives a sacrificial life waiting for The Captain and taking care of the boy. Their ambiguous love is a strong theme of the book but is never mentioned outright. Liza dies in an accident and the boy, now a man, heads to Panama to deliver the news to The Captain. In an abrupt shift away from the mystery of the love and the boy's background, we suddenly find ourselves in some kind of political intrigue. Hints of drugs, money, theft, and military interference, we are never sure who to trust or what to expect. As the book closes, we do not know who is The Enemy or even the truth of the situation. The King Kong references must be symbolic but of what? Love? Fear? Power?

One possible interpretation of this odd book is that it means nothing and points to some kind of nihilistic but realistic hopelessness. Yet considering past stories of Graham Greene, it is unlikely that this story is about despair. An overriding theme of Greene's books is that of transformation born out of suffering and challenges. When interpreted in terms of how people grow and improve and face their situations directly with honesty and integrity, we find a changed Captain, a changed Jim, and untrustworthy characters around them.

The weakness of this book may be its strength. There are many holes and questions and almost non-stop ambiguity about the people and the plot. Readers are left to make their own decisions and their own value judgments on the people and the events. Nobody is fully portrayed and no event is described in detail. Everyone and everything is a mystery and nothing seems to get settled. Reading this book feels like being lost and floating on a rough sea without any kind of goal or direction. But this feeling is also rather comforting in that it tends to represent much of how we experience life. Written by a master author nearing the end of an incredible writing career, Graham Greene may be calling the Enemy old age or death. The Captain may be the elusive but also potentially joyful feeling of love.

Highly recommended in spite of its challenges.

Greene can turn ordinary life into a horror show. At times an absurd show but still painful and emptying for the personae. Who knew things could get so complicated and turn out so badly for ordinary sinners who meant no big harm? Who knew one man could wreck such havoc among the little people of life? Dont get too depressed after you finish this book. Amazon Purchase.

The Captain And The Enemy is one of Graham Greene's late works. Like most of his novels, it is quite short, deceptively intense and, despite what might appear to be a quite literal plot, highly enigmatic.

Then captain of the title is a man we hardly get to know. His name might be Smith, or Baxter, or even anything he might have noticed in passing that morning. His title might be captain, or colonel, or sergeant, or even plain mister. Doubtless he had been Lord at some point. He can become anyone he wants, but at heart he's a pirate, sailing alone through life in search of elusive treasure. One day he was whiling time away with an acquaintance, a man always called The Devil, playing backgammon (or was it chess?). The stakes rose and The Devil wagered his son. The colonel won. The book opens with the colonel claiming ownership of Victor Baxter, then a boy at a boarding school. The colonel abducts the boy. They both agree that Victor is a naff name and from then on the boy is called Jim.

At home, if home it be, is Lisa, the woman to whom the captain continues to devote his life, even if the norm is devotion from afar. Lisa gets irregular cash or cheques through the post to cover the housekeeping and never questions the source. The Captain, of course, never offers anything more. Jim, as the lad Victor has become, becomes part of the insoluble equation. He keeps a journal for some reason and, discovering it years later, he embarks upon an edit.

And then Jim is grown up and in search of the man he now calls his father. He left Lisa and the household years before in search of fortune. Jim tracks him down to Panama and discovers a strange life packed with intrigue. When they meet again, Jim finds a changed man, someone he hardly recognises. Jim's response is to lie to him.

The Colonel is eventually revealed as a man with principles, principles worth personal risk. At least that's what he says today, and who ever knows about tomorrow?

And so we are left with memories of people who live towards the edge of even their own lives. They adopt identities bestowed by circumstance and change apparently at will. Who cares about contradiction? I mean really cares?

This is not one of Greene's best books, but it is worth a read if you are a fan of his works. About a third of the way through this book I was ready to chalk it up as a major disappointment. The payoff comes late, and when it does it makes the read well worth the time. The last third of the book is a marvelous sketch of relationships and love. Greene really knows how to put the subtleties of life into words.

This isn't a "buyer beware," it's just a "buyer be patient!" The Greene touch is here, you just have to get to it.