I think this may be my last Graham Greene, at least for a while… Every now and then I go back into his work and think I’ll find something exciting and elegant, but come back disappointed (last time: A Gun For Sale).

This tale of a bungled kidnapping in a small South American city started well, but soon stagnated. The kidnapped honorary consul, the unfortunate Charley Fortnum, is being held in a hut in the barrio by his captors, and local doctor Eduardo Plarr, now implicated in the escapade, has begun a lifeless, loveless affair with Fortnum’s new wife, an ex-prostitute now carrying Plarr’s baby. So we’re kind of short on sympathetic characters from the word go.

One of the captors is a former priest and he and Plarr have long, tedious discussions about faith and the church while the ultimatums come and go and the deadline looms (with no-one in authority really giving a damn if he’s shot or released). And the women are almost entirely passive and without motivation, like chess pieces, to be moved around, picked up and put down by the self-important men. By the end I couldn’t care less about any of the cast, even old Fortnum, a bungling and incompetent figure who at least had sincerity. But even he’s a bit of a repetitive windbag.