The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene (1973, Book)

Signed , Like New, First U.K. Edition, First Printing, Hardcover/Dust Jacket, List: 2.00 pounds, 335 pages The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene (October 2, 1904 – April 3, 1991) Henry Graham Greene OM CH was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century. Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and political issues of the modern world. The Power and the Glory won the 1941 Hawthornden Prize and The Heart of the Matter won the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Best of the James Tait Black . Greene was awarded the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize . Several of his stories have been filmed, some more than once, and he collaborated with filmmaker Carol Reed on The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949). He converted to Catholicism in 1926 after meeting his future wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning . Later in life he took to calling himself a “Catholic agnostic”. He died in 1991, aged 86, of leukemia , and was buried in Corseaux cemetery in Switzerland . William Golding called Greene “the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man’s consciousness and anxiety” . Greene is regarded as a major 20th-century novelist , and was praised by John Irving , prior to Greene’s death, as “the most accomplished living novelist in the English language”. Novelist Frederick Buechner called Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory a “tremendous influence”. By 1943, Greene had acquired the reputation of being the “leading English male novelist of his generation”. Acclaimed during his lifetime, Greene was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. In 1961 and 1966 he was among the final three candidates for the prize. In 1967, Greene was again among the final three choices, according to Nobel records unsealed on the 50th anniversary in 2017. The committee also considered Jorge Luis Borges and Miguel Ángel Asturias , with the latter the chosen winner. Greene remained a favorite to win the Nobel prize in the 1980s, but it was known that two influential members of the Swedish Academy , Artur Lundkvist and Lars Gyllensten , opposed the prize for Greene and he was never awarded. Greene lived with manic depression ( bipolar disorder ). He had a history of depression, which had a profound effect on his writing and personal life. In a letter to his wife, Vivien, he told her that he had “a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life,” and that “unfortunately, the disease is also one’s material”. The Honorary Consul was published in the United Kingdom in 1973. First U.K. Edition, First Printing, hand SIGNED , to full title page. No inscription; full signature only. BONUS: The dust jacket is protected by a clear, removable, mylar cover. Please only bid if you will pay within five days of auction’s end. 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Book Description In a provincial Argentinean town, Charley Fortnum, a British consul with dubious authority and a weakness for drink, is kidnapped by Paraguayan revolutionaries who have mistaken him for the American ambassador. Dr. Eduardo Plarr, a local physician with his own divided loyalties, serves as the negotiator between the rebels and the authorities. These fumbling characters play out an absurd drama of failure, hope, love, and betrayal against a backdrop of political chaos. The Honorary Consul is both a gripping novel of suspense and a penetrating psychological and sociological study of personal and political corruption. from Kirkus Reviews “It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognized plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and nearly forgotten.” These lines, early on in Graham Greene’s new novel, will establish what will be later confirmed — that The Honorary Consul is the best he has written in 25 years since The Heart of the Matter . It is set in one of those dusty backwaters which is such a fine terrain for his talent — an Argentinian province where marginal survivors en route to becoming burnt-out cases live with their failed expectations, with betrayal of one kind or another, with default — all those constants of the Greene novel. And somewhere between machismo — a reiterated word and concept here extended to mean life — and death, the possibilities of God and love may exist even where the interlining of comforts they provide is thin. Greene here, via one of his lapsed priests, is more articulate on the subject of God in our day and doubting age than he has been in years: “The God I believe in must be responsible for all the evil as well as for all the saints. He has to be a God made in our image with a night-side as well as a day-side… God is suffering the same evolution that we are, but perhaps with more pain.” Along with God, absurdity is everpresent (not the antics of The Comedians or Travels with My Aunt ), initially manifest when one of the three Englishmen on the scene, Fortnum, the Honorable Consul, is kidnapped by mistake. His steadily tippling existence, (“always two drinks under par”), as empty as his bogus title, has now achieved some meaning — he has married a young girl out of a brothel and is about to become a father. He has found someone to love. The second pillar of the community is a Doctor of Letters who eats a great deal as if to fill some unappeasable void. And the third is a Doctor Plarr who ministers to the poor, to Fortnum’s wife, and who is involved with the revolutionaries through an old friend and has hope of retrieving his long-disappeared father. He is now the intercessor as Fortnum lies in their hands — waiting to be shot, or released? The Honorary Consul is intensely involving in the conflicts which take place on more than one level, worldly and humane at the same time, and — as might be expected — unerring in its vistas of crumbling stucco and mud barrios to perhaps only a room with a view opening on a “dusty palm and a dead fountain.” When Greene writes as splendidly as he does here, we are reminded that he has no equivalent.