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Title: Our Man in Havana: An Entertainment (Twentieth Century Classics) by Graham Greene ISBN: 0-14-018493-7 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: September, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.29 (41 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A fun romp
Comment: This is really a fun book to read. Greene makes light of spying during the cold war. Wormold a vacuum cleaner dealer is recruited as a spy for the British in pre-Castro Cuba. He invents his information to keep the goverment money coming for his daughter who has expensive tastes. Wormold turns in drawings of vacuum cleaner parts as part of an imaginary secret installation in Cuba and invents sub-agents that all have to be paid. There is even a moral thrown in, people and families over goverments and ideologies. Good stuff!
Rating: 4
Summary: Wickedly entertaining
Comment: I went into OUR MAN IN HAVANA with very few expectations. I was under the vague impression that it was a thriller of sorts and I somehow knew that there had a been a film made out of it a number of decades back. So I was a bit surprised when I started reading the book and found out that it was a comedy. Surprised and delighted, because OUR MAN turned out to be one of the more understated and enjoyable satires that I've read in a good long time.
The book is a smart send up of a lot of the standard material one would have found in the noir films and books of the time (the novel was published in 1958, when the genre was starting to wear itself out). A British secret agent, looking to increase his community of contacts, has arranged for an ordinary vacuum cleaner salesman to file reports of any unusual activity in the area. The merchant, Mr. Wormold, reluctantly agrees to this arrangement for no reason other than the lure of extra money; he has a teenage daughter with very expensive tastes (to whit: men and horses). To keep himself employable, Wormold constructs a whole world of intrigue to write home about. The back-cover hints at one of the book's funnier gags, but all of Wormold's fictions (and especially the reaction they receive at the other end) are hilarious.
Despite the comic portions of the plot, the characters themselves are allowed to retain a certain dignity. The prose is also as lush as one would expect from a Graham Greene novel. One particular scene stood out as a wonderful piece of writing. Placing two main characters inside a dark, dingy saloon, Greene describes the other inhabitants as looking like paratroopers about to parachute out of an airplane. Their quick glances at the door and their hushed demeanor are all exquisitely described. I like comedies as much as the next guy, but it's rare to find one that is simply this literate and also so entertaining.
OUR MAN IN HAVANA is a relatively short novel; my copy clocks in at just two hundred twenty pages. It makes for a quick read, but not a throwaway one. It's smooth enough to be read as a straightforward thriller, if that's what you're in the mood for, as its comedy is more on the subtle than on the broad side. But, that said, the neat cuts of satire make this a hilarious and whimsical tale.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Spy Who Invented Himself
Comment: I first read this book several years ago when it was titled "The Tailor Of Panama" and written by John le Carré. I finally realize why I enjoyed that earlier book so, in that le Carré modeled the work so directly (and with proper acknowledgement) on this 1958 masterpiece.
Le Carré's effort isn't bad, but its often-maudlin tone detracts from the humor of the situation. Not so Greene, who subtitled his book "An Entertainment" and meant it. He doesn't waive all suspense and tragic overtones in search of punchlines; one of the chief joys of this book is how well it works as a spy novel. But unlike heavier Greene works like "The Power And The Glory," "Our Man" plays in a kind of high-adventure, almost Ian Fleming kind of way.
Greene's novel concerns a struggling British vacuum salesman living in Cuba, Jim Wormold, recruited by U.K. espionage to provide intelligence on the local scene as it becomes a hot spot in East-West relations. Wormold can't resist their money, but decides that instead of giving honest information, he will make up stories with the "assistance" of a stable of recruited agents he invents on the spot.
"Just lie and keep your freedom," advises Wormold's best friend, an old German doctor with a mysterious background named Hasselbacher. "They don't deserve the truth...They have no money, except what they take from men like you and me."
So Wormold does exactly that, for the benefit of his blossoming daughter, the flower of his heart whose faith in him and God he seeks to preserve though he doesn't share either belief. The result is a tangle of tall tales about alcoholic pilots and Mata Hari (...) he basically makes up as he goes along.
At one point, he wonders whether he pushed his luck when he presents the plans for one of his vacuum cleaner models as a secret Soviet base, but he's hopelessly addicted to his fiction almost as much for the pleasure of creation as for the financial reward: "It astonished Wormold how quickly he could reply to any questions about his characters; they seemed to live on the threshold of consciousness - he had only to turn on a light and there they were, frozen in some characteristic action."
Wormold is playing a dangerous game; in addition to snookering his own country, he is also attracting the notice both of the rival camp and the Havana police in the intimidating person of Captain Segura, a rumored torturer who covets Wormold's daughter. But in oddly detached fashion, perhaps because his life lost much of its purpose when his wife left him years ago, Wormold improvises his way through with cosmic aplomb.
There is a deeper meaning to this book, based on Greene's belief that neither East nor West deserved any special allegiance during the Cold War. One character puts it this way: "They haven't left us much to believe, have they? Even disbelief. I can't believe in anything bigger than a home, or anything vaguer than a human being."
It's possible to take issue with Greene's value-neutral attitude, but his execution is so deft, and his style so entertaining, that you can't help but admire him. "Our Man In Havana" is a thoroughly mesmerizing comedy that manages to impart some subversive truths about where the moral lines exist between serving one's government and serving one's fellow man.
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Title: The Quiet American (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) by Graham Greene ISBN: 0140185003 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1991 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Comedians (Twentieth Century Classics) by Graham Greene ISBN: 0140184945 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1991 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Power and the Glory (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) by Graham Greene, John Updike ISBN: 0142437301 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 25 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Heart of the Matter (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) by Graham Greene ISBN: 0140283323 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: October, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Third Man by Graham Greene ISBN: 0140286829 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: May, 1999 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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