My first encounter with Norman Lewis, better known for his travel writing, and this novel is very much a travel writer's novel. The POV character is Anglo-Guatemalan David Williams, deprived of his ancestral coffee plantation for the last five years (we're in the early 50's here) by the left-wing strongman who has just fallen to the inevitable coup as the story opens. Before he can get back to planting coffee, though, he has to pay his dues to the new honcho by helping the Big Gringo Coffee Co ("Universal Coffee") deal with some Indians who are strangely uninterested in the benefits of civilisation.

You can see why Graham Greene blurbed this one — the prose is exquisite at times, glinting and precise and never show-offy. The characters are reminiscent of Greene, too — expats gone varying degrees of native, one or two less detailed Ladino (which here seems to mean simply mestizo rather than Judeao-Spanish) characters, and various indistinguishable Indians (remember we're seeing this through Williams' eyes). The descriptions of Guatemala City, of the provincial town of Guadeloupe with its edgy cantinas, and of the surrounding jungles and highlands jump off the page. There's also a plot full of murder, mayhem and corruption, but somehow there's no sense of urgency or peril. Things just unfold futilely. I've ordered three of Lewis's travel books; I get the sense he sees plot as an encumbrance. ( )