Word: fortnum
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...heroine's men end up on the same-secret intelligence mission behind enemy lines in France. Things get tense. Who will live and who will die? Who will run across a crowded hospital ward to embrace fair Margaret by the final credits? Will the Nazis cut off Fortnum & Mason's supply of Twinings English Breakfast Tea? And, if so, will Ovaltine suffice? Hanover Street's answers to these questions tend to be tough, but no one ever said that war was a picnic...
Risks of Love. Greene readers, accustomed to the fact that nothing succeeds like failure, will soon realize that Charley Fortnum is one of the author's mysteriously blessed innocents. Plarr, a cool diagnostician and a rational man compulsively armed against the risks of love, just as clearly is Greene's familiar man in Gehenna. Convenient labels, though, do not destroy the extraordinary suspense and subtlety of the book...
...very end The Honorary Consul thins and flattens down to a claptrap scene-barely suitable for framing on celluloid-in which Fortnum, Plarr and the kidnapers, led (yes) by a renegade priest named Leon, are beleaguered by police with searchlights and a helicopter. But much of the novel is as finely controlled and exquisitely melancholy as a Mozart symphony...
...Buenos Aires. Romantic Novelist Jorge Julio Saavedra, author of The Taciturn Heart, whose machismo-marinated works are timeless and thus lifeless as well. A British ambassador who begins to sense the sheer outrage of U.S. imperialism when he finds that the embassy cook automatically fries his eggs Yankee style. Fortnum's wife Clara, who is (yes) a graduate of Madame Sanchez's immaculate brothel and the object of Fortnum's genuine and touching concern and chivalry. "When you get to my age," Fortnum explains, "it's not a bad thing to feel you've made...
Elsewhere Greene has pointed out what Charley Fortnum eventually demonstrates with his life, that the appropriate response to corruption is not cynicism but innocence. Not since The End of the Affair ("Dear God, you know I want your pain, but I don't want it now"), however, has Greene so baldly confronted the problem of God and evil, or the purpose, if any, of the horrors that God seems to visit alike upon those condemned to believe and those condemned to thirst after faith. "Free will was the excuse for everything," says Léon, the priest turned revolutionary...