Father Lost Me in a Backgammon Game

October 23, 1988

Father Lost Me in a Backgammon Game

By BRIAN MOORE

THE CAPTAIN AND THE ENEMY


By Graham Greene.

he opening paragraph at once and magisterially upends us into Graham Greene’s universe: ”I am now in my twenty-second year and yet the
only birthday which I can clearly distinguish among all the rest is my twelfth, for it was on that damp and misty day in September I met the Captain for the first time. I can still remember the wetness of the gravel under
my gym shoes in the school quad and how the blown leaves made the cloisters by the chapel slippery as I ran recklessly to escape from my enemies between one class and the next. I slithered and came to an abrupt halt while
my pursuers went whistling away, because there in the middle of the quad stood our formidable headmaster talking to a tall man in a bowler hat, a rare sight already at that date, so that he looked a little like an actor
in costume – an impression not so far wrong, for I never saw him in a bowler hat again. He carried a walking-stick over his shoulder at the slope like a soldier with a rifle. I had no idea who he might be, nor, of course,
did I know how he had won me the previous night, or so he was to claim, in a backgammon game with my father.”

Won him? In a backgammon game? And who is this unlikely stranger who has come to claim his prize? In fewer than 20 pages we see the boy deftly abducted from his boarding school, introduced to the ways of a superb confidence
man and taken, with his full consent, to live with Liza, a young woman who was once the mistress of the boy’s father. An author who can make us believe this scenario – and we do believe it – must be able to calibrate
a precise balance between the unlikely and the plausible. But that, of course, is Graham Greene’s strength. His new novel fits perfectly the passage from Browning’s ”Bishop Blougram’s Apology,”
which he once chose as the epigraph for all of his novels: Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things, The honest thief, the tender murderer, The superstitious atheist.

The Captain of the title is an honest thief – or is he? Reader and narrator embark on a journey that may, at any moment, end in a false trail. It is, as always, the true novelistic search, the search for a character. And in
this short, skillful book we enter those disparate worlds Mr. Greene has made his own – the England of ”Brighton Rock” and ”The Ministry of Fear,” and the exotic Central American
territories in which his restless talent has so often roamed.

In the first half of ”The Captain and the Enemy,” the narrator grows up in near-poverty in a basement flat in London as the ”son” of Liza, who has always wanted a child of her own.
The chronological setting is in the 1950’s, but the atmosphere is that of prewar England when the future held no promise and despair fell like rain on the grim streets and squares. This fudging of precise dates is
deliberate and heightens the dichotomy between what the narrator thinks he remembers and what he is inventing in his role as a writer. Thus, the unreliability of memory as a guide to our true feelings becomes one of the
themes of the book.

The Captain does not live at the flat. Rather, he is an infrequent and fleeting visitor. His relationship with Liza remains shy, awkward and ambiguous. There are hints of a daring jewel robbery, of hurried trips abroad and
the necessity to lie low from the police. Yet, always, the Captain returns and always he remains Liza’s faithful protector. She, for her part, waits eagerly for the sound of his footstep on the basement stairs.

Gradually we realize that we are reading a love story, or, rather, a meditation on the ways of love. The word itself is treated with the utmost suspicion by all concerned. ” ‘I think,’ he [ the Captain
] said with a kind of humble doubt, ‘that she’s a bit fond of me. In her own way of course.’ ” And the narrator’s real father, who was, long ago, responsible for Liza’s losing her child
in an abortion, says: ”You ought to leave a word like lovers to the gossip columns.”

As for the narrator, he is unsure of his true feelings toward the Captain, who acts as his surrogate father. He grows up, leaves home and becomes a provincial journalist. Liza falls ill. He returns for her death and discovers
that the Captain is now living in Panama and is sending money, accompanied, as always, by loving letters. Using some of this money, the narrator flies to Panama, deceives the Captain on the subject of Liza’s death
and is, at once, plunged into a colorful, highly dangerous world of political intrigue.

Suddenly, the tension of the writing changes and in a miraculous shift of gears Mr. Greene moves us into the chronology of a thriller. Mr. Quigly, a new and brilliantly unpredictable character, appears, involving the narrator
in the murky world of Somoza’s Nicaragua and Salvadoran death squads, both backed by sinister forces in the United States Congress who are trying to block the signing of a Panama Canal treaty by President Carter and
Gen. Omar Torrijos. The Captain is revealed as a former marijuana smuggler who is now a friend of the Torrijos regime. Narrator and Captain meet and, improbably, the Captain goes off to a quixotic hero’s death.

Improbably. But as we know, Mr. Greene can make the unlikely seem plausible. And if, at this point in the story, one feels that in his search for the Captain’s true character he has faltered, one recalls what he wrote
once, quoting his friend Herbert Read: ”At certain moments the individual is carried beyond his rational self, on to another ethical plane, where his actions are judged by new standards. The impulse which moves
him to irrational action I have called the sense of glory.”

This willingness to take the greatest fictional risks, this dissatisfaction with all that he has done before, this sense of life, which only the true, the exceptional novelist can infuse into his creations, are virtues which
remind us that, at the age of 84, Graham Greene remains, as V. S. Pritchett said, ”one of the two or three living novelists who really count.”

Brian Moore’s most recent novel is ”The Color of Blood.”

KING KONG’S BURDEN

Sometimes if I think of the Captain I imagine that in some strange way he will prove one day to have been my real father if only for this legacy of illegality which he has injected into my bloodstream. . . . And even though
I may choose to follow in his footsteps, it will still be hate that I shall feel. Compared with Liza I was nothing to him. . . . What do I do? . . . The Captain would have advised me. . . . Would I have trusted him? It
was only for Liza that he cared if he ever cared for her. . . . And then ”King Kong” came back into my mind and the words he had used to me then when I watched the King with his burden – a burden which
kicked him so hard that I wondered why he didn’t drop her into the street below: ”He loves her, boy, can’t you understand that?” Perhaps I have never understood the nature of love. . . .
I wish I had seen him once more or that I hadn’t lied to him.

— From ”The Captain
and the Enemy.”

Return to the Books Home Page