Perhaps this portrait of exiled Englishness can be traced back to this fifth published, at least at a first glimpse, most uncharacteristic novel. Each of these novels portrays the Englishmen exiled in these strange, seductive but dangerous regions, trying, and even failing to reconcile themselves to their new outposts of escape. There are the weary and disillusioned dentist Mr Tench and the idealistic Captain Fellowes, stranded in the anti-clerical state of Tabasco in The Power And The Glory there are the civil servants and their atabrine-yellowed wives of Sierra Leone in The Heart Of The Matter and there is even the meagre, three-man English community of Corrientes in The Honorary Consul. However, a crucial facet of his work has been a study of the dislocation and disorientation in which his Englishmen, either abroad or exiled, themselves, are vulnerable to the unexpected and ineluctable forces of moral corruption, vice and even larger events of revolution and war.

He was, of course, being a little too modest in his reverence and his own books can hardly be deemed as superficial or facile in their portrayals of the foreign lands he travelled and chronicled. Narayan’s The Bachelor of Arts, gently lamenting the inability of a writer to describe a foreign land comprehensively. “Perhaps, no one can write in depth about a foreign country – he can only write about the effect of that country on his own fellow countrymen, living as exiles or government servants or visitors”, wrote Graham Greene in his introduction for R.K. _ Dislocation and Disillusionment in England Made Me

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Rocinante graham greene