The Honorary Consul

Published 1973

We’re back on the boarder between Argentina and Paraguay, but this time on the Argentinian side. Smugglers ply their trade and political refugees and agitators look across the river to Paraguay with longing and fury. Eduardo Plarr moved to Buenos Aires from Paraguay when he was fourteen. His father English stayed in Paraguay to pursue his political activities and he has not seen him since and received a letter only once, early on. He is now a doctor and lives in a city on the northern boarder. He looks across the river with vague interest, wondering if his father is still alive.

In the meantime he has established his practice. The attractive young doctor is popular among the wives of the local bourgeoisie, but spends much of his time caring for the inhabitants of the poor neighborhood on the river’s edge. Beyond the social life that his position brings him, Plarr is friends with the two other Englishmen who live in this small city: Dr Humphries, an English teacher, and the honorary consul, Charley Fortnum. Charley is a friendly alcoholic who has a small maté farm outside of town. He found himself declared honorary consul by the British embassy, charged with serving the small English community in this part of the north and asked occasionally to provide a brief economic report or to act as guide and interpreter for a visitor. He has milked the position for all that it is worth, but he knows how useless he is to the embassy.

Charley has finally found something that matters more to him than drink: Clara. He married her out of the town brothel. Clara is now pregnant and he is anxious to ensure that he can be there for and support his wife and the child. Plarr has served as Clara’s doctor during her pregnancy and has been a frequent companion of Clara these past months, as well as the months before that, since he’s the father of the child. Clara loves Plarr, but there is one thing that Charley has that Plarr does not.

When the American ambassador wants to visit the north and see some ruins not far from town, Charley will be the guide, since he is familiar with the ruins and represents England in those parts. But when someone tips off some Paraguayan rebels that the American ambassador will be just on the other side of the river, they hatch a plan to kidnap him and use him as a hostage to demand the release of political prisoners. The band that does the kidnapping is led by León Rivas, a former priest, who was a school mate of Plarr.

But they make a mistake. When they get their hostage to the safe house, they discover that he’s not the American ambassador, but Charley Fortnum. They are uncertain how to proceed and Plarr is implicated too deep, with both Rivas and Fortnum, to stay out of the affair. If the authorities don’t budge on their demands, will they kill Charley?

*

Rivas and Plarr are idealists. They have followed their idealism through different vocations and have flirted with cynicism much as some people flirt with alcoholism. Plarr serves as a doctor to the town’s poor, but the austerity of his life extends to his soul and while he cares very much about his patients, he is incapable of caring much for any individual person. Rivas was a priest and has become a revolutionary, sacrificing everything to help the poor.

Much of the anguish that Rivas and Plarr share is related to the amount of human suffering in the world. Rivas has evolved an understanding of God that allows for God to be evil as well as good. Humans must make God good through their actions. Plarr is more comfortable in his atheism, but angry at the world.

In this book more than any of his books so far, one can take the characters as representatives of different ways of viewing life. Each character approaches life with more or less seriousness, giving more or less weight to the primacy of ideas or people. In this book, as in several of Greene’s books, the plot is driven by the different ways people use to face life. Being alive is difficult business. What stories do we tell ourselves to get through it? What values come out of those stories to direct our hopes and intentions?