Experimental feature: Order The Honorary Consul: A Novel (Simon & Schuster Classics) from the UK, Canada, Germany or France by clicking an appropriate flag below.

               

Some items available at Amazon.com are not available in all countries.

Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9780684871257
ISBN: 0684871254
Label: Simon & Schuster
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 288
Publication Date: 2000-09-11
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Studio: Simon & Schuster

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.

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Greene's most enduring novel
Review: In a provincial town 800 km north of Buenos Aires a group of revolutionaries kidnap by mistake Charly Fortnum, the Honorary Consul, instead of the American Ambassador. They request the liberation of 10 prisoners from Paraguay.
The characters are brilliantly drawn and the prose is sparse and taught. Fortnum, sixty-one year old, living on whisky and his disputed status as an "Honorary" British Consul marries a young ex-prostitute from Senora Sanchez's brothel. Dr Eduardo Plarr whose deficient emotions form the heart of the novel. Although Plarr is Clara's lover and the father of the child she's expecting, he still envies Fortnum's love for her because it is a feeling he has never been capable of experiencing himself. Even the minor characters of the kidnappers, Aquino, Father Rivas and Marta are sardonically drawn and during the bungled kidnap, plenty is said among them about justice, faith, love and God during the 3-day confine in a dirty mud and tin hut.

---

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Terrific Range of Characters in Desperate, Hopeless Plot
Review: "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.

---

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Not Quite Great
Review: At their best, Greene's novels put ordinary men in difficult moral situations. Then, his characters make heroic, but often self-defeating, moral choices. These great novels include THE POWER AND THE GLORY, THE HEART OF THE MATTER, THE QUIET AMERICAN, and THE COMEDIANS. Read them.

In THE HONORARY COUNSUL, Greene also creates difficult moral situations for his primary characters. But, in this novel, the dilemmas of Father Rivas and Dr. Plarr are without Greene's usual deft balance between choice and disaster.

Instead, Greene creates moral situations that appear doomed almost from the book's beginning. As a result, the choices that Rivas and Plarr make don't seem especially heroic. Instead, these characters seem to be caught in a death machine, which is indifferent to their personal dilemmas.

To a large extent, they are like Charley Fortnum, the novel's honorary counsel, who is kidnapped mistakenly by political revolutionaries. Here, Fortnum, despite lots of misery and recrimination, is basically waiting for the denouement, as the death machine grinds forward.

In Greene's great books, there is also the pleasure of seeing characters move through time and place. In contrast, much of this novel is conversation, with Greene making his points. Many of these are about moral responsibility. But others just seem "writerly", with Greene developing endless ironic connections between apparently dissimilar characters.

Nonetheless, this is a good read and a rewarding book, with the best scene the querulous formation of the Anglo-Argentinean Club.

---

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: God and Love in the Mind of an Apathetic Man
Review: 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.

---

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Dull, listless, sad
Review: This is what happens when great authors go to seed. It seems like a cruel mockery of a Greene novel, parading the same old themes around, corrupted more than ever by an unjustified excess liberalism. There isn't a single living character here, and even though the prose is generally competent, I think it has to be buried in consideration of the man's memory.

---

---