The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene

Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul is a deceptively ambitious project. And this applies as much to the reading of this great work as to its writing. The novel addresses some great themes on a multiplicity of levels and in every case succeeds in both illustrating issues and provoking thought via a deceptively simple story of kidnap and espionage. 

 The Honorary Consul is set in Argentina. We are in the north, far from the sophistication of cities, on the banks of the Paraná River, cheek by jowl with Paraguay. And over that border there is the iron-fisted rule of the General, an oppression that has created a social orderliness based on fear and persecution. About twenty years ago, a victim of that oppression, an Englishman resident in Paraguay, put his wife and young son onto a ferry to Argentina. He stayed behind to rejoin the struggle and was not heard of again.

The wife took up residence in Buenos Aires and devoted herself to gossip and sweet eating. The son, Eduardo Plarr, went to medical school, qualified and, at the start of the novel, is practising his profession in that small, provincial, northern town. His thoughts regularly cross the river to contemplate his father’s possible fate.

It is by virtue of his father’s nationality that Eduardo calls himself English. Eduardo is one of just three English residents in the town. Humphries used to be a teacher, while the third, Charles Fortnum, has the title of Honorary Consul. His role is minimal, of course, and his status is less than that. But he ekes a few bob out of the role by the resale of the new car he has a right to import every two years.

Charles is a heavy drinker, preferring whisky of all types, but willing to drink almost anything in the right measure. He and the other two English residents frequent the same bars, restaurants and brothels, and so they also share the same sources of pleasure. Eduardo is surprised to learn that Charles, a sixty-year-old slob, has married one of the girls – a twenty-year-old stripling – from their favoured haunt. He wonders how it will all work long before he becomes her doctor and thereby provides the most thorough examination that medical science knows. When she falls pregnant, she at least is sure whose child it is.

And then one day visitors from Paraguay bring news of Eduardo’s father. They have a plan. There is to be a visit by the American ambassador. Charles will actually have to do something. There is to be a visit to a local site. The group of opportunistic Paraguayans plan a kidnap. They will hold the ambassador until named detainees in Paraguay, Eduardo’s father amongst them, are released. They carry out their threat, but bungle it. As Charles Fortnum’s car passed by, they mistook his CC plate for CD and thereby kidnapped the wrong man.

Instead of an American ambassador, they have a merely an honorary consul, and one without much honour. El Tigre, their remote, anonymous commander is clearly not pleased. We never get to know much about El Tigre, but then perhaps we know more than we think. As ever in Graham Greene, the characters are presented with moral dilemmas. In The Honorary Consul these span the domestic, the religious, the familial and the political.

A short review can do no justice to either the complexity of the ideas or the economy and subtlety of the writer’s treatment of them. Tragedies ensue and there is even a happy ending of sorts. A former priest – there’s no such thing as a former priest! – grapples with the contradictions of liberation theology on the one hand and the obedience demanded of servile duty on the other. Graham Greene does not resolve all the dilemmas he raises. Good writing, after all, is not about answering questions. But it does necessarily involve asking the right ones.

The Honorary Consul is the work of a writer of genius at the height of his powers. It is also the work of a man with a keen sense of politics and morality. And it is also surely one of the few books that all people should list as a must read.

Cultured Tangos

It may be that in musical retrospect, from a luxury of twenty-twenty critical hindsight, that Astor Piazzolla will be seen as having done in the twentieth century for the tango what Frederick Chopin did in the nineteenth for the waltz. It is perhaps already an accepted position. 

With the waltz, Chopin took an established popular form and stretched its boundaries so that what an audience might have expected to be a little ditty was recast to express heroism, sensuality, pride or even occasional doubt. The little dance tune then, in Chopin’s slender hands, became an elegant art form, highly expressive, utterly Romantic in its ability to convey human emotion. 

The tango represents an apparently different proposition. Already sensuous by definition, there are elements of the romantic towards which the tango need not aspire. If Romanticism placed individual emotional responses upon the pedestal of artistic expression, by the time the tango aspired to truly international currency in the twentieth century, there was no longer any need to worry about an artist’s right to make a personal statement. 

With the rise of serialism, neo-classicism and, later, minimalism, artistic mores were already, perhaps, heading in the opposite direction, towards a new espousal of rigour and structure. Emotion worn on the cuffs, like concepts plucked from the back of a matchbox, seemed to dominate cultural activities in the latter part of the century whilst, at the same time, Althusser and Derrida, allied with the populism of mass culture, seemed to suggest that there were no new statements, let alone discoveries, to be made. A spectral free-for-all ruled, where distinctions of quality were suddenly both particularistic and individual to the point of exclusion. (This, of course, is necessarily a paradox for people promoting a populist pop culture, since they aspire to mass consumption of a single artistic vision, a statement that by definition cannot be worth more than any other – even randomly selected statement. As a result, those who tend to deny a critic’s right to make value judgments must themselves assume that such judgments are perfectly valid in the marketplace. It’s a contradictory position, but an essential one for purveyors of pop, since they must continue to describe the form as popular, despite the fact that the vast majority of its products prove themselves to be anything but.) 

Post-modernists thus hailed the soap opera alongside Shakespeare, a logic that renders a Coca Cola advertisement the greatest film ever made by virtue of its viewer numbers. And then there was Piazzolla, an enigma par excellence. On the one hand Astor Piazzolla is the quintessential mid-twentieth century composer. Classically trained, a pupil of Alberto Ginastera and Nadia Boulanger, and inspired by the commercial and folk music of his own country, he could have slotted alongside Villa Lobos, Ponce, or even Martinu or Copeland as a contributor to the century’s neo-classical-folk music paradigm. 

But what he did was quite different. He devoted his compositional energies to recreating and reinventing a popular idiom that was thoroughly specific to his own country, Argentina. The form, of course, was the tango. What is more, Astor Piazzolla concentrated on performance via his own ensembles and he achieved considerable success, albeit local until near the end of his life, over a career that spanned fifty years. But he expressed himself on the bandoneon, a squeezebox that lends itself to staccato, slapping attack, an instrument not peculiar to Argentina, but perhaps only well known to Argentinians. He died in 1992, his Romantic heroism national at best. 

It was in the early 1990s that arrangements of Piazzolla’s music began to appear on “classical” programmes. By the time a figure as august as Daniel Barenboim recorded his Tangos Among Friends, Mi Buenos Aires Querido, in 1995, they were already becoming established in the repertoire. I personally have heard performances of Piazzolla’s music for full orchestra, string orchestra, chamber orchestra, various formats of chamber ensemble, piano trio, solo piano, solo harp, flute and guitar, guitar solo, violin and piano, string quartet, string trio and, of course, bandoneon. But it is surely the chamber group that best fits this music. 

There is always a toughness to its apparent sensuality that tends to be overstated by the large numbers of a full orchestra. Lack of volume, on the other hand, tends to stress the saccharine. And if you want to find an exquisite match between the music’s toughness and sensuality, its durability versus its novelty, there is surely no better experience than that provided by Camerata Virtuosi, a septet led by violinist Joaquin Palomares and featuring saxophonist Claude Delangle. Their recording of Piazzolla’s music features Joaquin Palomares’ superb arrangements that capture the music’s directness and beauty while preserving its toughness. 

A Camerata Virtuosi performance in the Auditori de la Mediterrània, La Nucia in February 2008 featured all the pieces included in their recording of Piazzolla’s music. The group performed all four of the Seasons as a sextet with two violins, viola, cello, bass and piano. These pieces offer Joaquin Palomares a perfect vehicle to display his virtuoso violin playing which communicates the music’s line whilst at the same time decorates with highly effective jazz-like riffs. The rest of the pieces were performed by a septet in which Claude Delangle’s perfect soprano saxophone bent and teased its way through lambent legato lines.

It was playing of the highest quality. As on the recording, particularly successful were Oblivion and Milonga del Angel. Oblivion is the quintessential Piazzolla, a popular sing-along for the manic depressive perhaps, and not therefore a rarity. But the simplicity and understatement of the piece always works beautifully, even when played twice in the same concert, as in La Nucia. Milonga del Angel is a different kind of piece. Though superficially similar to Oblivion, it manages in its six minutes to develop through its binary form, so that different movements create different moods within the same material. A true highlight. Joaquin Palomares’ violin playing was, as always, more than elegant throughout and by the end the audience had experienced again the genius of Piazzolla courtesy of Palomares’ superb arrangements. Great music needs great interpreters, and Piazzolla’s has surely found one in Joaquin Palomares.