The Captain and the Enemy (1988)

What to say about this book? Not much. It could be seen as a work that would never have been published if some unknown writer had penned it. What a disappointment for those who hold Graham Green in high regard.
Maybe I'm missing something? Is it an allegorical treatment of Green's early
life? Or an oblique examination of the development of the Modern Novel?
I don' think so. It's just a meandering, tedious story that leads to nowhere in
particular. Only a GG addict would keep reading to the end. Only a GG fanatic
would give it even one star. ( )

It's OK. Not the best compared to the rest of Greene's fiction, but a decent story all the same. ( )

Perhaps this is a bit more Greene meets Waugh, it has that kind of a slow train wreck fascination thing going on. But there's a lightness of tone that suggests the possibility of a happy outcome. But whereas Waugh might deliver an ironic ending (think 'Black Mischief'), where the hero comes up trumps, well Greene doesn't do it so often. I don't want to give the ending away so I won't say how it goes in this case. But it is beautifully written, penetrating and ineffably sad in what it leaves drifting between the lines. Greene has long had an attraction to questions of truth and lies, the nature of feeling and love, and the covert professions. The formulae comes together perfectly here once again. ( )

Love Mr. Greene... fun short one, He wrote this quite late in his life... odd kind of ending, seemed sort of tacked on, but still a very enjoyable bit. ( )

A strange story that opens with the apparent kidnapping of a young boy from a boarding school by a friend of the boy's father. The story has a Dickensian flavor -- physical poverty, living just outside the law, naive childhood among strangers, dark mysterious sometimes visitors to the basement abode, real relatives who express concern but who don't quite come through. This odd dance continues through to young adulthood when the boy chases after his foster father in Panama and discovers the root of his mysterious life. All in all an odd, satisfying book for me, even with self-referetail end, and the jerk from the Dickensian era I had been inhabiting, into modern politics. ( )