The Honorary Consul: A Novel (Simon & Schuster Classics) (Hardcover)

by Graham Greene (Author) "DOCTOR EDUARDO PLARR STOOD IN THE SMALL PORT on the Parana, among the rails and yellow cranes, watching where a horizontal plume of smoke stretched..." (more)
Key Phrases: Doctor Plarr, Charley Fortnum, Father Rivas (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

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.

About the Author
Graham Greene was born in 1904 in Hertfordshire, England. His writing career took off with Stamboul Train, a political novel, in 1932. He became an international literary success, producing some of the best novels of the era, including The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The End of the Affair (1951), and The Quiet American (1956). His work in the British Foreign Office during World War II provided material for his popular spy novels, Our Man in Havana (1958), The Honorary Consul (1973), The Human Factor (1978), and The Tenth Man (1985). Greene received the Order of Merit, one of Britain's highest honors, in 1986. His prolific work, which includes novels, plays, travel books, essays, children's stories, articles, short stories, letters, and autobiographies, has been translated into 27 languages and has sold more than 20 million copies. Greene is often hailed as the father of the modern spy novel. He died in 1991 in Switzerland.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (September 11, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684871254
• ISBN-13: 978-0684871257
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #822,214 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars God and Love in the Mind of an Apathetic Man, April 20, 2004

By	Barry E. DeWalt (Redding, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Graham Greene presents the story of a half-English medical doctor, Eduardo Plarr, living in a backwater town in Argentina. The title derives from Plarr's relationship with the Honorary Consul, Charley Fortnum, and his adulterous relationship with Fortnum's former-prostitute wife. This work of literature is very well written and has the taste of art.

Greene's writing expresses the subtlety of his characters - apathetic men who go through life not having been impressed with much. Greene's theme is love and how or whether it is expressed between men and women, and also how it is expressed (if expressed at all) between man and God. Graham puts into the thoughts of Dr. Plarr:

"`Love' was a claim which he wouldn't meet, a responsibility he would refuse to accept, a demand ... So many times his mother had used the word when he was a child; it was like the threat of an armed robber. `Put up your hands or else ...' Something was always asked in return: obedience, an apology, a kiss which one had no desire to give." And again:

"That stupid banal word love. It's never meant anything to me. Like the word God."

Thus, Greene puts these "larger than ourselves" themes on the backs of his self-absorbed characters. The result is masterful. If you are looking to read classic literature - the kind of literature that actually requires the reader to think and ponder the implications of the print - then this book is for you. Highly recommended.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great characters, August 11, 2003

By	Thomas More (Scenic Oklahoma) - See all my reviews

This is a well-written story combining the elements of a political/spy novel with those of a Greek tragedy. Set in Argentina, Greene tells the tale of a botched political kidnapping which provides the context for an interesting character study. The ineptitude of Greene's kidnappers and their gradual self-destruction, to me, symbolized the disarray and tumult in the lives of each character. Greene's interesting cast of characters includes a chameleon-like prostitute who tailors her personality to accommodate the varying expectations and inadequacies of her clients, a fallen priest who cannot seem to shed his former skin, a marginalized novelist who is crippled by his pride, an emotionless doctor whose heart is as sterile as his instruments, and an inconsequential "honorary" consul who fails at everything except loving. This novel is by no means cheery, but I came away from it with an important reminder that life is lived in vain if lived without having loved--even if that love is unrequited.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Terrific Range of Characters in Desperate, Hopeless Plot, September 9, 2005

By	Scott Schiefelbein (Portland, Oregon United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

"The Honorary Consul" is the first Graham Greene novel I've read, and it is easy to see why Greene has earned so many devoted fans and seemingly over-the-top superlatives over his long career.

Based on this novel, Greene's strength seems to be creating a rich cast of characters, full of different tics, scars, dreams, virtues, and flaws, and dropping them into a plot of balanced tragedy and farce. By stirring great ingredients into a delicious recipe, Greene created a novel to savour and one, I would bet, improves with each reading.

Set in an anonymous border town just on the Argentine side of Paraguay, "The Honorary Consul" focuses on the hapless, accidental kidnapping of Charley Fortnum, the titular honorary consul. A band of revolutionaries, lethally inept, swipe the British Fortnum instead of their target, the American ambassador, whom they wanted to exchange for political prisoners in the Paraguayan dictatorship nearby. Unfortunately for the kidnappers, Fortnum's title is more impressive than his station, and nobody is all that eager to save Fortnum, much less give in to the kidnappers' demands.

Further adding to the travesty of the situation, Fortnum's only connection to the outside world is Dr. Plarr, a half-British, half Argentinian physician who is also having an affair with Fortnum's wife, a former prostitute. Plarr, whose father vanished into the Paraguayan prison system years ago, is a man incapable of emotion -- when it comes to relationships, he's good at the physics but not the chemistry.

Plarr struggles to help the innocent Fortnum escape his looming fate -- if ten political prisoners are not released from Paraguay, the kidnappers will shoot Fortnum. Through his efforts both with the kidnappers and with several possible saviors, Plarr meets and interacts with a host of characters whose range of quirks and passions would be at home in a Casablanca cafe.

Greene writes with an economic, spare prose that is nevertheless powerful, often using dialogue and soliloquies to advance the story rather than long-winded descriptions of setting. Clocking in at under 300 pages, "The Honorary Consul" is a riveting read that probably goes too fast on the first read. I plan on putting it aside for a few months before taking it up again . . . I'm sure I'll catch a bit more meaning the second time around, but there was plenty for the first trip through.

A dark, occasionally depressing novel of lost opportunities, false passions, and the ultimate quest for truth, "The Honorary Consul" is a heck of a read. Check it out.