Our Man in Havana - Graham Greene (1958)

 

Rating: Excellent

Graham Greene was a prolific writer, with many significant novels to his name, such as Brighton Rock (1938), The Quiet American (1955) and the screenplay to The Third Man (1949), a brilliant film that has aged extremely well. Greene also gets a pivotal reference in one of my favourite films, Donny Darko (2001), when a Greene novel that is censored by the high school gives Donny gnostic guidance. Due to his significant cultural presence and the fact that Greene is considered one of the finest novelists of the twentieth century, I've long known about him, but I had never managed to get around to reading his work. Apparently (according to Wikipedia) Greene divided his works into two genres, thrillers, which he referred to as 'entertainments' and the others as 'literary works'. I'm uncertain as how Our Man in Havana should be regarded, being a black comedy of sorts with a light humorous tone; ostensibly it's not a thriller, but I have a feeling that Greene perhaps regarded it as one of his 'entertainments'. The novel is genuinely funny, following the adventures of vacuum cleaner salesman, James Wormold, a world weary man who's wife left him to be the sole parent of his teenage daughter, Milly, who has a extravagant lifestyle to maintain. When Wormold is approached by the mysterious MI6 plant, Hawthorne, to spy for MI6 he reluctantly takes up the offer in order to help cover the cost of his daughter's many worldly desires. There begins a series of tricky situations, faked reports and run-ins with shady characters who threaten his life. Greene himself actually was recruited into the MI6 in 1941, where he encountered information about a character call Garbo, who was based in Portugal and filed fictitious reports in order to gain bonuses and keep his espionage career going. 

Greene, contemplating his 'entertainments'

Published four years before the Cuban Missile Crisis, which took the world to the brink of nuclear war, the novel is eerily prescient. Wormold uses the fittings from one of the vacuum cleaners he sells as inspiration for faked drawings of military structures in the mountainous areas of Cuba, and of course MI6 are very concerned. Wormold nominates a range of informants, some of whom he knows of, but does not know in person. Reality and falsehood collide when weird things start to happen to his informants, leading to some very tricky situations indeed. There's some romance too, when love interest Beatrice Severn is sent from MI6 to assist Wormold. There's also the comedic, yet pathetic character of Dr. Hasselbacher, an elderly German expat who is Wormold's only real friend in Havana. He also has to deal with the sinister threat of Captain Segura, a military thug and the owner of a wallet supposedly made from human skin, who has romantic designs on Milly. Such characters, on paper, could seem like caricatures, however Greene really brings them alive and imbues them with complex motives and human foibles. Greene's prose is concise and snappy, providing a propulsive edge to the narrative. It's a clever and classy novel and one gets the sense that, well, they just don't write them like this any more. If Our Man in Havana is typical of Greene's oeuvre then I'm keen to explore further novels. Greene was certainly prolific, with some 26 novels, numerous short stories, plays and screenplays published. Our Man in Havana was also adapted for a movie in 1959, starring Alec Guinness and Noel Coward and was critically acclaimed at the time, although hasn't had the same afterlife as The Third Man, but if it is any where near as fine as the novel it would be worth watching.