In Graham Greene's final novel a secretive stranger takes Victor Baxter out of a boarding school much like that of Greene's own youth. The "Captain" changes the boy's name to Jim and brings him to London to serve as a surrogate son to a mysterious woman named Liza. Raised in odd, touching circumstances, Jim never comprehends the enduring relationship between the Captain and Liza, and he struggles to understand what love itself is. Although the novel then takes the Captain and Jim into seedy political intrigue in Panama and Nicaragua, it finally returns to the question of what the proofs of human love are. John Auchard's introduction establishes links to Greene's biography as it considers the places in the lost past where themes that preoccupy a character-or a novelist-had their flashes of genesis. Book jacket.