The Captain and the Enemy by Graham Greene

I cannot pretend that all these details which I am trying so hard to reconstruct from my memory are necessarily true, but I feel myself today driven by a compulsive passion now that we are separated to make these two people live before my eyes again, to bring them back out of the shadows and set them to play their sad parts as closely as possible to the truth. I want above anything else to make the two of them clear to myself, so that they will continue to live as visibly as two photographs might seem to do propped up on a shelf beside my bed, but I don't own a single photograph of either of them. Why am I so possessed by them? Of the Captain I have heard nothing for years, and Liza, whom I left of my own accord, I see only from time to time, always with a sense of guilt. It's not because of any love I feel for them. It is as though I had taken them quite coldbloodedly as fictional characters to satisfy this passionate desire of mine.

As a boy, Jim finds himself taken out of his boarding school by a mysterious figure who calls himself "The Captain." Jim doesn't mind going--he's one of those boys who seems to always be on the outside of the group, a victim for bullies. The Captain, it turns out, has "won" Jim in a backgammon game from his true father, a dissolute gambler known to Jim only as "The Devil." The Captain is Jim's liberator in many ways, but he makes it clear that he has no plans to be a substitute father for the boy, except in the sense that he changes his name immediately, from Victor. He quickly instructs Jim in a series of confidence games and petty tricks that reveal his true nature as a con artist and thief--the name change, in fact, is more in the way of a guise than a fatherly act. Ultimately, the Captain drops Jim off with his girlfriend Liza, who seems to have made a stray remark about wanting a child, a remark the Captain has gone above and beyond to fill. Jim ekes out a strange life with Liza, who never quite rises to the level of a mother, a strange and peripheral existence punctuated by the Captain's abandonments and returns.

I was immediately captivated by the beginning of The Captain and the Enemy. Greene thrusts us into the position of young Jim, trying to figure out the strange figure who has dropped into his life and transformed it, perhaps for the better, perhaps not. "The Captain" is a Greenian figure par excellence, a con artist and trickster native to the English underworld. If he's hard to figure out, it's because he doesn't want to be figured out. Never do we really understand what the Captain's grift is: is he a big-time criminal, or a petty one? The only thing that Jim seems to be able to say for sure is that Liza, his not-quite mother, is head over heels in love with him. Later, as Jim tries to make sense of the strange childhood he has had, this fact hits him with depressing clarity: in that household or any other, no one loved him as much as these two loved each other.

I was disappointed, then, by the second half of The Captain and the Enemy, which transforms something unstable and weird into much more common Greene fare. As an adult, Jim travels to Panama, where the Captain has been living, to inform him of Liza's death, but when he arrives, he finds that he's unable to do it--not out of tenderness but what seems to be a willful rejection of the shape of the life that the Captain forced upon him as a child. The choice of Panama seems to be inspired by Greene's friendship with leader Omar Torrijos, which he wrote about in Getting to Know the General. The intrigue that embroils Jim is obscurely related to the revolution in Nicaragua and Panama's peculiar importance to the United States, as well as the agitation over the return of the Canal Zone. The Captain is implicated now in some kind of international espionage, and his enemy is an English journalist--who may be a secret American--named Quigley. Is Quigley the enemy, or is it Jim, who is offered the opportunity to betray his father figure? It's all very Oedipal, but the intrigue is too blurry and the story too familiar; it made me long for the strangeness of the opening chapter.