Our Man in Havana (Penguin Classics) | Graham Greene | An Entertaining Footnote to History

Our Man in Havana (Penguin Classics) | Graham Greene | a pleasure

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Our Man in Havana ...

	Our Man in Havana (Penguin Classics) Graham Greene Penguin Classics, 2007 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 63 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Graham Greene?s classic Cuban spy story, now with a new package and a new introduction

First published in 1959, Our Man in Havana is an espionage thriller, a penetrating character study, and a political satire that still resonates today. Conceived as one of Graham Greene?s ?entertainments,? it tells of MI6?s man in Havana, Wormold, a former vacuum-cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent out of economic necessity. To keep his job, he files bogus reports based on Lamb?s Tales from Shakespeare and dreams up military installations from vacuum-cleaner designs. Then his stories start coming disturbingly true.

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An Entertaining Footnote to History

Graham Greene, a major, well-known 20th century British author, had a very long life, most of the century, and a very long and prolific writing career. He may be best known for "The Third Man," "The End of the Affair," and "The Power and the Glory," but his books were greatly honored, highly-praised by the critics, generally best sellers, and often made into movies. As was "Our Man in Havana," a later work of his, initially published on October 6, 1958, and just re-released. Greene famously divided his books into 'novels,' such as the "Power and the Glory," and 'entertainments,' such as "Our Man in Havana." While working on the book at hand, he wrote to the Indian writer R.K. Narayan, a friend, that he was at work on "a rather hack job, an entertainment called 'Our Man in Havana.' I am getting too old to boil the pot." However, he also wrote to his mistress Catherine Walston in 1956 that "Our Man" was potentially a "very funny plot which if it comes off will make a footnote to history."

The book is set in Havana, Cuba, during the last days of the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, and reproduces time and place very accurately on the page. The plot's reasonably gripping, and resonant. Like his later follower, John LeCarre, Greene had first-hand experience of the British Secret Service. On the recommendation of his lifelong friend Kim Philby, who turned out to be England's most notorious postwar spy/traitor, Greene had served in Africa's Sierra Leone during World War II, and this is a spy story. The lead character is Jim Wormold, an English seller of vacuum cleaners based in Havana. (Everyone can take a moment here to remember Alec Guinness as this character in the excellent movie based on the book.) Wormold is poor and desperate: his wife has left him, and he hasn't enough money to pay his hefty bar bills, let alone keep his beautiful teenaged daughter Milly in her preferred lifestyle. So, without realizing what he's doing, or where it will take him and those he loves, he agrees to become a British spy; "Old Blighty's" man in Havana.

This may be an entertaining entertainment, but not to worry: there's plenty more serious Greene here. His instinctive anti-Americanism, left-wing viewpoints; and jaded cynicism as to the spy's life. His remarkable ability to create characters, even those who don't get many pages, such as Captain Segura, a local policeman/torture enthusiast, with a cigarette case made from human skin. Segura strongly resembles Batista's dread 'enforcer' Captain Ventura, and in his dark glasses and unmarked car, he will turn up again, and again, creating terror in various Latin American countries, most notably in Haitian dictator "Papa Doc" Duvalier's feared "toutons macoute."

Greene traveled widely, as a journalist, and to research his novels. He had great serendipity in his visits: many of them occurred at highly interesting times. "Our Man" was published in October, 1956; on New Years Day 1959 the revolutionary Fidel Castro came down from the mountains. The author set his Vietnamese war novel, "The Quiet American" just before the critical battle of Dien Bien Phu. He set "The Comedians" in the last days of Duvalier's Haiti. He had another stroke of luck: the long American blockade of Cuba has resulted in the country, and the city of Havana, staying much the same as the writer described them nearly fifty years ago.

All in all, think I'd have to go with "a very funny plot which if it comes off will make a footnote to history."

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a pleasure

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!

The deadly vacuum-cleaner

Wormold has an uneventful but stable life. He is a fortysomething Englishman living in Havana, where he stayed when he fell in love with a Cuban woman who has now left him for good, in the company of their 17 year old daughter, the cyinical, likable, and beautiful Milly. Wormold has a vacuum-cleaner shop, but business hasn't been going well lately, on account of political trouble in pre-Castro Cuba. Every day, at noon, Wormold goes to the bar to have a drink and a chat with his friend, the old doctor Hasselbacher. One day he meets an English stanger who starts harrassing him into becoming a spy for the British MI-6, the intelligence agency. Wormold doesn't really feel like it, him being a peaceful and risk-avoiding guy. But Milly does something silly which puts Wormold in serious economic problem. Plus, the MI-6 is willing to pay for his services, so reluctantly but with no choice, he accepts to spy for the British. As he is no social mingler, he finds nothing to report about, but report he must, if he wants the money to keep coming in. Hasselbacher gives him what seems to be good advice: since the information is to be secret, no one will know it but Wormold, so why not invent everything, including sub-agents whom will also have good salaries and travel expenses? Wormold follow this advice and begins to send fake reports, mainly about a weapons-system "currently being developed" by the Cubans in the Eastern mountains. London is shocked and surprised. Could Wormold provide some blueprints of the weapons? Sure, why not. Little by little, and then at speeding frenzy, things get out of control. Covert sub-agents, both those whose names were just taken from the Country Club directory, as well as those living only in Wormold's imagination, begin to die and suffer attacks. Reinforcements come from London. Wormold doesn't know what to do and he's afraid about sweet Milly, who is wanted as a wife by the chief of police, a noted torturer and corrupt man. What will Wormold do?

This book is as hilarious as you will get. Greene's black humor is wonderful and the characters are all likable in a spoofy way. Unwise recruitment of spies proves disastrous for the British government, but delicious for any reader of this crazy farce, one of the best spies books there are. Greene shows here, as always, a genius for plot and character-development, as well as a humor absent from his bleakest books, like "The Power and the Glory", or "A Burnt-Out Case". Great.

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Greene at his Most Optimistic

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

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.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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