The Noble and the Absurd

by William Abrahams

THE HONORARY CONSUL
by Graham Greene
Simon and Schuster, $7.95

Next October Graham Greene will be seventy, old enough, should he wish, to play the unlikely role of Dean of English Novelists—Anthony Powell, his only rival, is a year younger—and to accept those other honors that lie in wait for a writer of his acknowledged eminence. One can imagine—just—the summons to Buckingham Palace (Sir Graham? Lord Greene? or the simple grandeur of the Order of Merit, as with E. M. Forster and Henry James?).

But, whatever glories lie in the future, this year Graham Greene is only a young sixty-nine (to judge from his prose), and not yet ready to be hoisted up on a pedestal. In The Honorary Consul one discovers none of the symptoms of respectable laureled age: pomposity, dither, and self-approbation. Unless I have miscounted, among the forty-seven books that comprise his work thus far, it is his nineteenth novel, and it is one of his best, as vivid, alive, and unmistakably, uniquely his own as the novels he was writing when he was half his present age—Brighton Rock, The Confidential Agent, and The Power and the Glory.

Until a few years ago, it was Mr. Greene’s practice to assign his novels to categories: there were the “Entertainments” (presumably too entertaining to be serious), such as The Ministry of Fear and Our Man in Havana, and there were the “Novels” (presumably too serious to be entertaining), such as The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair. Now, very sensibly, he has decided to abolish the distinction, and the sometime Entertainments are henceforth to be listed among his works simply as novels—which is what his admirers have always thought them to be anyway. Categories, whether in art or life, are approximations at best; the firm line of definition, meant to separate one thing from another, begins to blur virtually as it is being drawn; and the quotation from Hardy—“All things merge in one another, good into evil, generosity into justice, religion into politics . . ."—which serves as a wonderfully appropriate epigraph to The Honorary Consul is not inappropriate to this reconsideration by the author of what his books are. In all of them, whatever their differences in form and tone and intention, and no matter that Greene is a well-known Catholic writer, a highly personal view of life is being expressed, of the incongruities and contradictions that are an inescapable part of human existence, a view which came to the author at an extraordinarily early age.

Not for him the Wordsworthian reassurance that “Heaven lies about us in our infancy.” He knew, from the very beginning it seems, that the idyllic and the macabre could be contained simultaneously within the space of one’s pram, and from there onward through all the living spaces one occupies up to and including one’s coffin. In a characteristic passage in his autobiography A Sort of Life, he writes:

The first thing I remember is sitting in a pram at the top of a hill with a dead dog lying at my feet. . . . The dog, as I know now, was a pug owned by my elder sister. It had been run over—by a horse carriage?—and killed and the nurse thought it convenient to bring the cadaver home this way.

Now consider another characteristic passage, this one from The Honorary Consul. Dr. Eduardo Plarr, the central character in the novel, is entering a fashionable tearoom in Buenos Aires to have tea with his elderly mother -not necessarily an idyllic occasion, but one certainly within the genteel, as opposed to the macabre, tradition:

He saw her at the far end of the crowded tearoom, sitting in unrelieved black before a plate of sweet cakes. She said, “You are ten minutes late, Eduardo.” From his early childhood they had always spoken Spanish together. Only with his father had he spoken English and his father was a man of few words.

“I am sorry, mother. You should have begun.” When he bent to kiss her cheek he could smell the hot chocolate in her cup like a sweet breath from a tomb.

Only to a novelist whose first memory was of a dead dog in his pram would that incongruous, unexpected, concluding simile come so effortlessly—for surely it is not the usual thing to associate the smell of hot chocolate with “a sweet breath from the tomb.” Yet within the context of the novel, where Mrs. Plarr is effectively one of the living dead, and given what we know of Plarr himself, its aptness is never in question: such a thought might well have crossed his mind at such a moment.

Dr. Plarr lives in a provincial city in Argentina, far from the teashop in Buenos Aires where his mother gobbles up éclairs all the afternoons of her life, just over the border from Paraguay, where his father has been a political prisoner for many years. Among his patients is Jorge Julio Saavreda (one of Greene’s happiest inventions), a Latin-American novelist of preternatural solemnity, dedicated in life and art to machismo—no danger of Saavreda writing a mere entertainment.

There was a heavy music in his style, the drum-beats of destiny were never very far away, but Doctor Plarr sometimes had a longing to exclaim to his melancholy patient, “Life isn’t like that. Life isn’t noble or dignified. Even LatinAmerican life. Nothing is ineluctable [a favorite word of Saavreda’s]. Life has surprises. Life is absurd.”

That life is absurd is given comic, ironic, sympathetic, touching, and finally even noble expression (as it were, in spite of itself) in The Honorary Consul, which is constructed around the story of a botched political kidnapping. Mr. Greene, with a fine disregard for what’s in fashion in fiction, continues as in the past to pay a good deal of attention to plot in the novel, and his deployment of it here is a remarkable demonstration of how much plot still has to give to the novelist who is willing to approach it seriously. In the circumstances, it would be unfair to prospective readers to elaborate upon it and so diminish the pleasure that awaits them (as for myself, I had the good fortune to read The Honorary Consul with no notion whatever of what was coming: I can say that in the management of suspense and surprise to the last page, as in all other aspects of his craft, Mr. Greene is never less than masterly). Still, I think there is no harm in revealing that the wrong man is kidnapped, not the American Ambassador who might have been held successfully for ransom (the release of a batch of political prisoners), but poor Charlie Fortnum, the Honorary Consul, who is, in the words of the British Ambassador, “pitiably small beer.”

The relationship between Plarr and Fortnum, and the relationship of the two to the ex-priest and the ex-poet who are the revolutionaries turned kidnappers—the doctor, who has been a schoolboy friend of theirs in Paraguay, is called in by them now to treat their victim — these relationships are at the heart of the novel, giving it a depth, subtlety, and power to move, quite different from the pleasurable anxiety induced by its plot. Unlikely and contrasting protagonists, Plarr and Fortnum have little in common—until they are brought together in the hideaway in the barrio—beyond their being two-thirds of the British colony in the port city, and their sharing (unknowingly on Fortnum’s part) the same woman: Fortnum’s wife, Clara, whom Fortnum loves and whom Plarr makes love to.

If at first the Honorary Consul is made to seem merely contemptible, little more than a lachrymose, selfpitying drunk, as the action progresses and he continues to be held by his kidnappers, awaiting an answer to their ultimatum, he gradually begins to change. Or, more likely, we are made to see him (as happens with Plarr) in a new light, no longer a figure of low sentimental comedy easily shrugged off, but a man recognizably human, pitiable (and understandable) in his weakness, and admirable in his certainties. And Plarr, with his cynicism and studious detachment, his world-weariness, self-contempt, and icy sexual prowess that make him, in his fashion, a figure of high bleak comedy, also begins to change.

At one point in the action (which I shall not describe), he reflects, “For heaven’s sake let this comedy end in comedy. None of us are suited to tragedy.” But this sort of self-disparagement, so characteristic of the strategy by which he defends himself against involvement, is not adequate to the situation in which he finds himself. He is forced, first, to recognize the inadequacy of his defenses—“That stupid banal word love. It’s never meant anything to me. Like the word God. I know how to fuck—I don’t know how to love”—then, to involve himself, deprecating all the while what he does, in life, in death.

Very subtly, the premises with which the novel begins have been modified and finally reversed. Yes, life is absurd; but it is more than that; it is also, or can be at certain moments, however embarrassing the word, noble; and to behave nobly is the possibility open to the least of us, whether a priest who has broken his vows, a doctor incapable of giving himself to another, or a sentimental, used-up honorary consul.