Book summary

In this novel of politics and psychology, the narrator is a small-town British journalist who returns to London for the funeral of his guardian, Liza, who had raised him as her own son. While in London, he discovers that "the Captain," a shadowy figure who supported Liza financially, is now living in Panama, and he travels there to find him and sort out what the nature of his relationship with Liza had been. The Captain turns out to be at the center of a political intrigue, which the narrator finds himself increasingly drawn into.

Media reviews

"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.'"