The Captain and the Enemy

Published 1988

This is Graham Greene’s final novel. It’s a curious novel, ridden with a diffuse melancholy that by the end finds a home in Omar Torrijos’ Panama, a place that Greene no doubt looked back at with melancholy.

A boy’s mother is dead and his father uninterested in him. He grows up between a mediocre boarding school, in which he is bullied everyday, and his aunt’s house, in which he is bored to death. When a man who calls himself the Captain comes to school and says that he won the boy at backgammon from the boy’s father, the boy is willing to go with him.

The Captain takes the boy to Liza, who the Captain says will be his mother now. The Captain wants Liza to have a companion, so that she isn’t alone during his long absences. Both the boy, who takes the name Jim at this point, and Liza are wary of the term “mother”, but they grow comfortable living together. Jim eventually starts going to a day school after his aunt catches up to them and threatens to go to the police.

The Captain is often absent, sometimes for months at a time, but always sends money to support Liza. His line of business often puts him at risk and he must move quickly. One time, just before the Captain disappears for a few months, Liza and Jim read in the newspaper about the robbery of a diamond store that involved someone that resembles the Captain. The years pass and Jim grows up and finds work as a journalist.

One day, the Captain sends a letter saying that he has finally found stable employment and that Liza should come at once to join him in Panama. But Liza is in hospital and so Jim comes instead. The Captain is now running guns to the Sandinistas at the informal behest of Torrijos. Over a few weeks in Panama Jim learns what has driven the Captain all these years and how deep is the connection between the Captain and Liza.

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This book is a slow, obscure meditation on motives and the forms love can take. For once in a Graham Greene novel, sexual love does not appear. Here, love takes the form of a source of lifelong motivation centered on a person. The Captain has followed a complicated career, one that did not lend itself to the stability of a home life, but everything he does has Liza’s interests in mind. Her interests have driven him around the world: to conquer the relative poverty that Liza lives in. So that she would not be lonely, he acquired Jim. He acts in ways that don’t always make sense but are always in good faith to Liza.

Cultural and religious memes often tell us about the importance of Love: “Love is all you need” and “Let all that you do be done in love” (In Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos, love even seems to be the actual fabric of the universe in a way that I didn’t quite understand.) In The Captain and the Enemy love is never explicit and to a casual observer not even present, but it drives the Captain and Liza throughout their lives.