Product Description

Graham Greene's gripping tragicomedy of a bungled kidnapping in a provincial Argentinian town is considered one of his finest. It tells of Charley Fortnum, the 'Honorary Consul', a whisky-sodden figure of dubious authority taken by a group of revolutionaries. As Eduardo Plarr, a local doctor, negotiates with revolutionaries and authorities for Fortnum's release, the corruption of both becomes evident. In this spare, tense novel, Graham Greene explores the morality of a political system that turns priests into killers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29502 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 265 pages

About the Author
Graham Greene was born in 1904. He worked as a journalist and and critic, and was later employed by the Foreign Office. He died in April 1991.

Customer Reviews

Greene at his best
With all due respect to the in house reviewer I would like to assure all potential readers of this fine novel that it is in no way a political book. The politics referred to serve to bring the characters together. At no point in the novel does Greene investigate any of the characters' politics. Nor does he analyse the political situation in Paraguay and Argentina where the novel is set.
It is a novel about love; about the inability to love and the nature of love. It's about the nature of god and how the protagonists have to come to terms with the difficult idea that god is both good and evil. It's about the nature of the catholic church; the complicated nature of human beings. It's about that favourite paradox of Green's that very often those seemingly furthest from redemption, humanity and god are in fact the closest to them.
It's a beautiful book aching with humanity- our foibles, our goodness and our badness. But please don't call it a political book. Greene would have had a fit. It is after all the novel he most preferred of all those he wrote.

Greene's most enduring novel
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.
This audiobook features Tim Pigott-Smith as reader, one of the best in the Chivers series.

Moving tragi-comedy of errors from Graham Greene
South America in the 1970s. A group of revolutionaries plan to highlight their cause by kidnapping the American ambassador. Unfortunately, they get it wrong and kidnap instead Charley Fortnum, a boozy expatriate Briton whose quasi-official status as an honorary consul amunts to little more than the right to import and sell a car every two years. Dr Plarr, one of only two other Britons in the city, is involved from the start: not only was it he who provided the revolutionaries with their information, but he is also having an affair with Fortnum's young wife. Though this is more sombre in tone than some of Greene's other 'entertainments', there is much wry humour in these pages, but what struck me most was the degree of emotional involvement Greene manages to produce in what could easily have been a cynical tale of unprincipled behaviour and bungling. The novel takes us down a dark road, and I found some of the later scenes really quite sad, but I hope I'm not giving too much away by saying that the road leads eventually to redemption - of a kind.