Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 09 Apr 2018

Our Man In Havana by Graham Greene

One of our guest reviewers and writers, Alun Severn wrote a piece for this site back in February 2016 that he called Greeneland in which he noted that Graham Greene had his ‘serious’ Catholic novels and also others he called ‘entertainments’ – a category that includes Our Man In Havana. Rereading this piece not so long ago it occurred to me that whilst I knew the film quite well, it’s been over 35 years since I last read the novel.

Greene wrote this book following his own flirtation with the British secret service and so I imagine the desire to lampoon his previous employers must have been irresistible. But whilst there’s plenty of farce in this book it’s not just a comic novel but something which is, I think, rather darker.

The premise of the story is pretty straightforward. Abandoned by the wife who brought him to Cuba in the first place, the mild and rather unworldly Jim Wormold lives in Havana with his spoiled teenage daughter, Milly who uses her Catholic faith as a weapon to get her own way. Wormold ekes out a living of sorts as a vacuum-cleaner salesman but Milly’s demands and his own desire to keep her from straying under the influence of a seemingly unsavoury chief of police, forces him to accept an approach to become a British spy in order to earn extra money.

Wormold’s only friend, a German exile called Dr Hasselbacher, advises him to take the money on offer but to simply make up his intelligence reports and give his spy-masters what they want to hear. He embraces this advice with gusto and sends back information – entirely fictional – of a secret, possibly nuclear, installation in the Cuban hills. The diagrams he constructs are in fact pencil studies of vacuum cleaner parts on a giganitic scale.

However, what he hasn’t taken into account is the level of Cold War paranoia that dominates the secret service and they take his reports entirely at face value. A secretary, Beatrice, and wireless operator are dispatched to help Wormold with his entirely fictitious string of locally recruited agents – and the inevitable farcical outcome results with Wormold attempting to cover his tracks.

In addition to these complications what Wormold hasn’t anticipated is that the paranoia of the British is in fact matched by that of the foreign agents who are also lurking on the island. This is where events start to take a seriously more sinister turn and lives - including Wormold's - are threatened and lost as the plot plays out.

I really can’t say more at this point without giving away far too much of the plot and, if you haven’t read the book, you wouldn’t thank me for revealing how the story plays out.

Under the cloak of comedy Greene has a swipe at just about everything you can think of: the hypocrisy of Catholics, the essentially dunderheaded nature of bureaucracy, the insanity of the Cold war, the racism of Western powers and the corruption of realpolitik. But perhaps more importantly I think, Greene explores what happens when essentially decent people find themselves in situations where moral values become relative.

This is Cuba before the revolution and the moral turpitude of the Batista regime is embodied in the person of the chief of police who is pursuing Millie – he likes to brag about the cigarette case he has that is covered in human skin. Greene doesn't hold back on painting a picture of a man corrupted by power and yet, despite his reptilian nature, he turns out to be no worse than those fighting out their covert Cold War games who kill by remote control from London, Moscow or Washington.

I should also say that this is really beautifully written – it just slides along and I read it in only two sittings. Greene’s ability to paint character in just a few strokes is fantastically impressive and his capacity to smuggle acid into the mix almost painlessly and in a way that puts a smile on your face just keeps you coming back for more.

Greene's reputation has fallen from the high literary pinnacle it once occupied and I’ve got no idea why that is. Fashions in writers come and go but I’d be willing to bet that Greene does have a revival of his fortunes in the not too distant future because writers this good don’t come along every day.

 

Terry Potter

April 2018