Sinners and Saints

...Eduardo Plarr is an unmarried doctor whose Paraguayan mother is eating herself to death in Buenos Aires, and whose antifascist British father disappeared years ago in Paraguay...

...No one knows his way around this garbage heap better than Theroux's sassy narrator, Jack Flowers (ne Fiori in the North End of Boston), an absolutely stunning creation...

...Greene replied firmly, 'Brogan's no good to me...

...He can ride with the punches...

...315 pp., $7.95), the 69-year-old Greene has come back to the kind of characters, milieu and God-intoxicated longing that mark his finest work...

...The consul, Charley Fortnum, is the perfection of Greene's "seedy decay," a boozy old fake and failure, usually too drunk to walk...

...By giving tourists "the ultimate souvenir" of Singapore, he knows he is offering an indispensable service?the experience, in the flesh, of fantasy...

...It is an explosively imaginative, manically virtuoso performance by a young novelist who is no amateur...

...It is a world of vagabonds, hoodlums, hustlers, and fishy adventurers, a clogged drain of losers and the lost...

...Jack's redemption, his respect for his own eccentric clarity of honor, is defined not by what Orwell contemptuously labeled as Greene's "cult of the sanctified sinner," but by his insatiable readiness and zest for all the grubby, beautiful, or merely mysterious cards that life will go on dealing out...

...Partly, this is the ultimate mockery of the grimy survivor who has managed to remain expectantly alive on every crumbling edge of chronic desperation...

...At a London dinner years ago, Brogan found himself sitting between those two Catholic mainstays of modern British fiction, Greene and Evelyn Waugh...

...Saint Jack is set in Singapore, where he lectured on 17th-century drama at the university for three years...

...Though He cannot rationally exist, He does and must...

...The fourth, and least convincing, instrument in Greene's wayward quartet is a Paraguayan ex-priest, Leon Rivas, an old schoolmate of Plarr's and now a Marxist guerrilla trying to overthrow Paraguay's General Stroessner...

...His three earlier novels were about Africa, where he spent some time in the Peace Corps...

...but I believe in His goodness too...

...Here, in what is for Greene a characteristic mingling of tragedy and farce, the four main characters play out their slyly unpredictable roles during a few days of stress...

...And Theroux does not argue his pointhe writes it, as a novelist...

...or of a woman who feels forced to choose between her lover and Him...

...A mechanical flabbiness of thought, incident, language, and especially religious argument blights The Honorary Consul at its core, and after reading it one is left with melancholic resentment at the failing power of a gloriously gifted novelist...

...Indeed, the book's epigraph, from Hardy, is profoundly relevant to each of Greene's major novels: "All things merge in one another Good into evil, generosity into justice, religion into politics...

...The scene is a drab provincial city in northern Argentina, separated from Paraguay and its repressive dictatorship only by the wide Parana River...

...But mainly, and quite unironically, Theroux sees Jack as a good man untouched by the degradations of cynicism, who would never allow his extravagant dreams of glory to weaken his grasp of the here and now...

...And those of Greene's admirers who yawned their way through doodles of the past decade like The Comedians and Travels with My Aunt were probably resigned to the belief that he would never again return to the unending theological drama that was once his stock in trade...

...He'll never end in seedy decay.' " Guilt-ridden sinor "seedy decay"is Greene's great theme, and fundamental to the dark dramatizations of his idiosyncratic Catholicism, in which the sinner, not the saint, dwells "at the heart of Christianity...

...Still, the huzzahs for this book should be cautious ones...

...In a better day Jack was the proud owner of a brothel...

...in fact, Clara is Dr...

...In their interminable catechism, Greene strains to move religious mountains but brings forth only such bleary-minded paradoxes as "I believe in the evil of God...

...At 53, Jack has managed to stay afloat on the permanent drifter's treacherous currents for 14 years, longer than he wants to remember...

...The witty energy of Paul Theroux's Saint Jack (Houghton Mifflin, 247 pp., $5.95) would be dazzling even without the contrast to Greene's fatigue...

...Once a merciless student of human hokum and God's mayhem, Greene now limps along with hackneyed questions and easy non-answers...

...In a moment of bumbling confusion they mistake Fortnum for the Ambassador, and the action focuses on Plarr's seemingly doomed attempt to convince the guerrillas to free their useless hostage...

...Yet it has been much too long since Greene gave the sort of ironic but dedicated attention only he can pay to the mortal despair of, say, a Mexican "whiskey-priest" hounded by demons...

...Saint Jack is a funny, outrageous, meticulously witnessed, beautifully wrought book about a smelly world, told by a funny and outrageous individual who knows, better than his betters, that only in this life can man even begin to guess the secret of his fragile salvation...

...But some Chinese gangsters, jealous of the white man's success, kidnapped him, tattooed both his arms with violent Chinese obscenities and curses, and burned down his pleasure palace...

...Yet sadly, after a brilliant chain of set-pieces and satirical portraits in the first half of the book, the rest of the novel degenerates into a doctrinal tug-of-war between the detached rationalist Plarr and the passionate believer Rivas...

...He has recently reached a strangely moving epiphany by falling in love with, and marrying, a beautiful young whore from the town's brothel the third principal whom he happily deludes himself into thinking he has gotten pregnant...

...or of a man willing to suffer eternal damnation rather than cause pain to another human being...

...Plarr's mistress and the child is his...

...It is a belief in a quality of humanness that a person earns within and for himself...

...In the course of the narrative, a CIA man named Schuck (predictably mispronounced by the Orientals) puts Jack in charge of Paradise Gardens, a cozy hotel-bordello where American soldiers can spend R&R leave from Vietnam...

...When Jack refuses to betray an innocent friend for a large sum, he confirms his sainthood...

...Unlike Greene's agonizing Catholic vision of sin and grace, Theroux has a faith that is neither Catholic nor institutional nor, in any recognizable form, religious...

...Pimping may seem a repellent profession, yet Jack, who had vaguely wanted to become a writer, takes a high-flown view of his "priestly vocation...

...While teaching, Theroux must have wandered boldly and far, for the Singapore of his book is a great distance from the sober order of academe...

...To extort the release of some political prisoners, Rivas and his fellow-revolutionaries sneak across the river border to kidnap the American Ambassador on his visit to Plan's city...

...The novel's characters, ranging across a smeary spectrum of races and nationalities, somehow eke out a grimy-hand-to-mouth existence on their island refuge...

...Finally, in the bloody, absurdly contrived ending, Greene seems to lose all real interest in both the melodrama and its message, snapping the story closed with a burst of gunfire and a desultory exchange of platitudes...

...Now, however, they may wish to utter a hallelujah, for in his new novel...

...At one point, "Waugh . . . told Greene that he should write a novel about me...

...Then, after the Army suddenly decides to close the place down, Jack stoically moves back to his free-lance procuring...

...Here our lopsided missionary is in his element, dispensing comfort and ecstasy to all those nice boys about to die...

...In his quintessential work the Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair A believer's faith is tried and strained to the breaking point at every tortuous turn by God's willfully misleading barrage of evidence and the perpetual recurrence of evil without the hope of grace...

...The-roux, an American, has impudently chosen the colonial ground thought to be the exclusive property of British writers...

...The Honorary Consul (Simon & Schuster...

...Nevertheless, inside this tough raconteur lurks a lyrical brooder: "I had a fear: that I might turn out to be one of those travelers who, unnerved by the unconscious boldness of their distance . . . believe themselves to be off course . . . and very soon they are nowhere, travelers who never arrive, who do not die but are lost and never found, like those unfortunate Arctic explorers...

...As always, Greene displays his technical mastery of the sense of place, artfully lighting The Honorary Consul's setting with a harsh but autumnal flame...

...Why does Theroux call this marvelously funny and beguiling bum Saint Jack...

...Now he makes his living as a full-time procurer...