A man of many names
A man with many names (original title: The Captain and the Enemy ) is a novel by Graham Greene , which was published in 1988. The German-language edition (translated by Monika Blaich) was published by Zsolnay Verlag in Vienna that same year . It is the last novel that Greene completed in his lifetime.
content
The school boy Viktor Baxter is a half-orphan. His closest reference person is his aunt, the sister of his deceased mother, to whom his father deported him. He leads a dreary life as a boarding school student.
One day a soldier-looking man turns up there and shows the principal his father's written permission to leave school with the boy. Viktor quickly realizes that the stranger who lets himself be addressed as "Captain" is not thinking of bringing him back there. Rather, he takes him to an empty house in London, where the only caretaker who lives is a single younger woman named Liza, for whom Viktor is supposed to take on the role of her child. Viktor agrees, but the next morning the captain has disappeared.
In the following weeks and months he begins to understand the network of relationships between his new "mother" Liza, his father and the captain, although neither Liza nor the captain, who keeps appearing and disappearing quickly, openly with him talk: Liza was once his father's lover, who, when he became pregnant, forced her to have an illegal abortion, even though she would have liked to have a child herself. However, after this abortion, Liza could no longer have children. At this time, the father met the captain by chance, and when he got to know Liza and her story, he played a game of backgammon with the father - with the son making the stake. The winner should be able to dispose of the child.
The captain's personality captivates Viktor (who now calls himself "Jim") the most, although he becomes less and less visible over time. Slowly, however, the image of a person who became an “adrenaline junkie” in the Second World War and simply cannot find his way back to a bourgeois life and does not shy away from illegal methods in pursuit of his goals is slowly emerging. Whether his goals are real or fantastic, however, often remains unclear, as does the question of whether he actually was an intelligence service employee, as is sometimes suggested. But when he disappeared for years, Viktor (who went to school in London and worked as a reporter after graduating) begins to lose interest.
Liza dies in a car accident, and while cleaning up her apartment, her foster son finds the latest message from the captain, who is apparently in Panama and asks Liza to send Viktor to him and follow him later. Viktor is actually on his way.
On arrival in Panama, however, he cannot find the captain, even if he has made sure that he has accommodation and escort. The relationships in which the captain is there remain even more mysterious to Viktor than in England. Although he suspects that the captain has become entangled in illegal activities here too, he is unable to see through the complex network into which international politics is now also playing - the signing of the Torrijos-Carter treaties is imminent , and beforehand, every person in Panama City who is not Panamanian appears to be a foreign secret agent. When the captain reappears and does not want to inform him about it, instead treating him like a schoolboy, it comes to a break: Viktor reveals to the captain that Liza is dead, whereupon he throws him out and disappears again. Finally Viktor receives the news that the captain attempted an attack on the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle and was killed in the process. Since he is no longer inhibited by any personal ties, he decides not to return to England, but to travel to South America. First of all, he would like to go to Valparaiso in Chile.
In the last scene of the novel, through a conversation in the office of the Panamanian secret service officer Colonel Martinez, the reader learns that Viktor was killed in a car accident on the way to the airport, which was also an attack. In the wastebasket of its hotel room the secret service finds its notes, which form the content of the previous chapters, and which are now being intensively examined by the intelligence service.
Influences
In 1976 the leader of the Panamanian military junta, Omar Torrijos, sought contact with Graham Greene, who eventually developed into a real friendship between the two men. Through this friendship Greene not only experienced the events of the Torrijos-Carter treaties from an internal perspective, it also directed his interest in politics in South America and the influence of the USA there under the Monroe Doctrine after the Second World War. In the novel, however, these processes only form the background for the psychological argument between the protagonists in the second part.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ulrich Greiwe: Graham Greene and the wealth of life. dtv, Munich, 2004, pp. 77-85