“Memory Cheats”: deception, recollection, and the problem of reading in The Captain And The Enemy

Abstract

The Captain and the Enemy is one of Greene’s least well-known and least loved novels. It has received little critical attention, but that is hardly any wonder: it is a frustrating, perplexing, and ultimately unfulfilling read. Greene himself had great difficulty completing it. Leopoldo Durán, in Graham Greene: Friend and Brother, notes that the revision of The Captain and the Enemy almost drove him to despair. He did not like it. He never had liked it. He returned the typescript several times; on various occasions he told me: ‘at last it’s finished.’ And yet, on 9 November 1987, he was still working on this stubborn novel. And to think he had kept it in the drawer of his table for fourteen years.1