Graham Greene's Last Night in Villahermosa

From The Lawless Roads (record of a journey taken in 1938)

What books to take on a journey? It is an interesting - and important - problem. In West Africa once I had made the mistake of taking the Anatomy of Melancholy, with the idea that it would, as it were, match the mood. It matched all right, but what one really needs is contrast, and so I surrendered perhaps my only hope of ever reading War and Peace in favour of something overwhelmingly national. And one did want, I found, an English book in this hating and hateful country. I am not sure how the sentiment of Dr Thorne - of Frank Gresham divided from Mary by his birth and by the necessity of marrying money if Greshambury were to be maintained, and of Mary's rich inheritance from her scoundrelly uncle after he had drunk himself to death - I am not sure how it would have gone down at home. I think there would have been mental reservations before one surrendered to the charm, but here - in this hot forgotten tropic town, among the ants and the beetles - the simplicity of the sentiment did literally fill the eyes with tears. It is a love story and there are few love stories in literature; love in fiction is so often now - as Hemingway expresses it - what hangs up behind the bathroom door. Dr Thorne, too, is the perfect 'popular' novel - and when one is lonely one wants to claim kinship with all the simple friendly people turning the pages of their Home Notes. With what superb skill Trollope maintains a kind of fictitious suspense. We know exactly from an early page that Frank will be faithful to Mary, that Sir Roger Scatcherd will die and leave her a fortune, that Lady Arabella will be humbled and old Dr Thorne be able to resume his friendship with the squire, that Frank and Mary will live happy ever after; but we co-operate with the author in his management of the plot, we pretend to feel suspense, and that frank co-operation is a mark of the popular novel, for the great sentimental popular heart doesn't care for real suspense, to be in genuine doubt of the lovers' destiny. In Barchester Towers Trollope says in so many words that he will have no mysteries in his story - the widow, he tells you, will not marry Mr Slope: the reader need have no fears. In this more 'popular' story, he doesn't deny his creed; the suspense is patently unreal, but he allows us to pretend we fear, and sometimes it was a real strain - to stop after twenty pages and lie and sweat upon the iron bed and not to know.
But it was worse to have finished the book altogether, to have finished with proud delightful Mary Thorne and have nothing to fall back on but the hopeless dentist and the hotel proprietor swinging in his chair dreaming of Diaz. I had badly miscalculated in Mexico City - I thought I should be back in three weeks, and the three weeks were half gone already. How slowly while the beetles flocked in I spun out the last paragraph! 'And now we have but one word left for the doctor. "If you don't come and dine with me," said the squire to him, when they found themselves both deserted, "mind, I shall come and dine with you." And on this principle they seem to act. Dr Thorne continues to extend his practice, to the great disgust of Dr Fillgrave; and when Mary suggested to him that he should retire he almost boxed her ears. He knows the way, however, to Boxall Hill as well as ever he did, and is willing to acknowledge that the tea there is almost as good as it ever was at Greshambury.'
So England faded out and Mexico remained. I had never in my life been so homesick, and the fault was Trollope's. His England was not the England I knew, and yet... I lay on my back and tried to project myself into home. Jules Romains once wrote a novel about just such a possibility; I built up the familiar in my mind carefully, chair by chair, book by book -the windows just there, and the buses going by, and the squeals of children on the Common. But it wasn't real: this was real -the high empty room and the tiled and swarming floor and the heat and the sour river smell.