Recommendations
Books Like The Captain and the Enemy
Best books to read after The Captain and the Enemy by Graham Greene
The Captain and the Enemy is Greene's enigmatic final novel — Victor Baxter's attempt to reconstruct who the Captain was, forty years after being won in a game of backgammon and taken from his father. If the novel's dreamlike quality and its portrait of a child shaped by a mystery he never understood moved you, these books share its concern with the adult reconstruction of childhood, its interest in the mysterious benefactor who turns out to be very different from what they first appeared, and its conviction that the deepest influences leave the deepest mysteries.
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The Quiet American
by Graham Greene
The essential Greene — his most politically serious novel and the best introduction to the concerns The Captain and the Enemy returns to at the very end of his career; reading the mature work before the late enigmatic finale illuminates both
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Monsignor Quixote
by Graham Greene
The companion in Greene's final period — the loving and relatively peaceful comedy that immediately precedes The Captain and the Enemy; reading them together gives the full picture of Greene's final creative decade
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The Go-Between
by L.P. Hartley
Hartley's novel about a boy who serves as a messenger between two lovers and whose life is permanently shaped by what he witnesses — the essential parallel to The Captain and the Enemy in its portrait of a child used by adults for purposes he doesn't understand and who carries the mystery into his adult life
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Atonement
by Ian McEwan
McEwan's novel about a child's false accusation and its consequences — the most important recent British novel in the tradition The Captain and the Enemy belongs to: the adult narrator reconstructing a childhood that was shaped by an event they couldn't fully understand at the time
- 5Buy
Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's novel about Pip's mysterious benefactor — the essential Victorian predecessor to The Captain and the Enemy's portrait of a child taken under the wing of a mysterious figure who turns out to be very different from what they first appeared; Greene working within a tradition that Dickens established
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The End of the Affair
by Graham Greene
The companion in Greene's autobiographical fiction — Sarah Miles and Bendrix; the most nakedly personal of his middle-period novels, which The Captain and the Enemy returns to in a very different, more enigmatic register in his final creative statement
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The Enigma of Arrival
by V.S. Naipaul
Naipaul's novel about his arrival in England from Trinidad and his gradual understanding of the landscape and community he has entered — the most important contemporary parallel to The Captain and the Enemy in its portrait of a man gradually reconstructing an understanding of a world that was more complex than it first appeared
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
by John le Carré
Le Carré's masterpiece of retrospective reconstruction — the most direct parallel in the spy-fiction tradition to The Captain and the Enemy's portrait of a man trying to reconstruct who someone was from the available evidence; where le Carré's reconstruction is organized around institutional betrayal, Greene's is organized around personal mystery
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