Greene wrote this intricate and delicate novel late in his career, when he was pretty well stewed by alcohol and a lifetime of general dissolution. He thought it was, perhaps, the best of his works. As I read it, I thought, No way. Even tho several of his novels are on my all-time favorite list, I found the going a little tedious in this book, and here and there I sighed and thought, (forgive me, Graham), same-old, same-old. Oh, you know: the sweaty misery, the black-hearted doubt of faith, the guilty sex. We're in Greene Country. But I was wrong-wrong-wrong: it's another great book. He took me by surprise with the beauty and tenderness of his final pages. I couldn't guess how he was going to bring it to any conclusion other than a depressing one--but it's trancendent and beautiful instead.

For me this was a toss up between a 3 and a 4. It's pretty standard Graham Greene fare.

Some of the Catholic soul-searching becomes a bit tedious towards the end of the book, I think. What saves it is the bleak humour, and the character of the honorary consul himself, an alcoholic minor official who's accidentally abducted by some Marxist revolutionaries. The consul is unable to function without the 'proper measure' of Long John whiskey.

Graham Greene is well loved as a story teller, but still I think he is under-rated as a writer. His prose is simple and unadorned, but there is a quality about it - a life-like, naturalness that enables us to enter his world and believe in his characters. Partly perhaps because he's been to these places and observed these people; he seems to have an uncanny familiarity (in many of his novels) with the goings-on within seedy brothels. Wink-wink.

The moral ambiguities and uncertain loyalties of Greeneland, the stunted emotional landscape where Graham Greene's characters find themselves, is a terrifying place to visit and a horribly boring place to live. Charley Fortnum--the name redolent of English high tea, for which one shops at Fornum and Mason--is an alcoholic expatriate living in Argentina, possibly no longer able to (or interested in) returning to the sceptered isle that was his homeland. When bungling revolutionaries miss the British ambassador and kidnap Charley, a very poor substitute, almost no one misses him, fewer care that he has been taken and he is of no value to his captors. He is a typical protagonist in Greene's later novels, lacking the wounded drive of the nameless whiskey priest of "The Power and the Glory" or the overweening, corrupt patriotism of Pyle in "The Quiet American".

Barely a four star rating, closer to 3.5.