Our Man in Havana, published in 1958 just months before Castro's coup, captures the earlier Cold War years in a Havana that was a pit of intrigue though the unanswerable questions of who is an agent and who isn't, and to what recognizable side does anyone belong make it comic and very dangerous at the same time. This is the story of an expat Brit in Havana, a vacuum cleaner salesman who has no real allegiance to politics of any stripe but who allows himself to be recruited to spy for the mother country since, as a single parent with a high maintenance teenage daughter, he's got bills to pay.
The one thing Jim Wormold rightly assesses is, no one knows what is really going on. The directions from the home office are so vague that it is easy enough to invent agents and reports and not get caught, even when the home office sends the lovely agent Beatrice to pose as his secretary. It does not take long, though, for his deceptions to be picked up as truth, which multiplies the absurd intrigues and pushes him into the sinister heart of a place where a local police captain who lusts after Wormold's daughter coolly delivers a scary appraisal of who belongs to the "torturable" and "untorturable" classes. The ending is very funny but there are some tragedies leading up to it, the collateral damage of operating in the vortex of the world's political and moral ambiguities. Our Man in Havana is a run up of sorts to Greene's later novel The Human Factor, in which nothing is funny at all but the same question is asked of both protagonists: what do you put first, family or country?
Christopher Hitchens provides a decent critical introduction to the Penguin edition and like all critical introductions it is pocked with spoilers, so read it as an afterward. He puts the novel in context with Greene's life and literary themes. Our Man in Havana was out there, complete with an agent number assigned by the home office, before James Bond and before George Smiley. With the Cold War robbed of its meaning after the Berlin Wall came down, and with intelligence mangled by political ambitions in the early 21st century, it is interesting to see that these stalwarts of the spy genre still have something with which to amuse or soberly ponder the world.
"Great Book"
2009-01-23
- Reviewed By An Amazon User
Very funny, but at the same time poignant and examines the emotions of the characters pretty well.
This is the fifth Graham Greene novel I've read, and the first with an even moderately happy ending. A pseudo-spy novel with a pseudo-spy named Wormold, the book is more a meditation on where human allegiance should really be when government and family seem at odds with each other. It's also a fairly quick read (for Greene) that's funny as hell.
"Disappointed"
2008-01-23
- Reviewed By An Amazon User
I read a lot of Graham Greene, and this is the one one of his works that disappointed. Characters were dull and the plot, slow to develop. Also, the technology described seemed very dated in view of today's world.
Nice to see this classic in print again. Hitchen's insightful forward adds to the pleasure of reading Greene's wonderful "entertainment" again. If you haven't read it yet, do so now!
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"Wonderful fun ..."
"Never underestimate the power of a vacuum cleaner"
"Disappointed"