The Less Deceived (Our Man in Havana - Graham Greene)

Member Name: michaelhudson

Product:	Our Man in Havana - Graham Greene
Date:	30/07/03 (2301 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: See Text

Disadvantages: See Text

Havana in the late-1950s is a city to visit not to live in, though not many tourists come now that the President's regime is nearing its end. But Wormold, an ineffectual, beliefless vacuum cleaner salesman whose valued personal possessions would fit into a single crate, has problems unrelated to politics. His wife left on the morning plane to Miami more than a decade ago, his 16-year-old daughter spends more money than he can earn, and his company have sent him a new model called the Atomic Pile Cleaner at a time of uncertain power supply and heightened nuclear paranoia.

Wormold is full of sad caution, the archetypal rootless urban man set adrift on the dangerous edges of Greeneland. Law-abiding and incapable of action, he allocates six minutes every morning for companionship with his only friend, who still addresses him by his surname. So it's hardly surprising that, when approached to become the British agent in Havana on $150 a month plus expenses, he finds it far easier to invent informers than actually recruit them, selecting names at random from a list of Country Club members and compiling bogus reports with the aid of a large map and the current issue of Time magazine. But his creative imagination takes him into shadowy territory when he passes off vacuum cleaner designs as secret military installations, and fatal coincidences unravel into assassination, blackmail and betrayal.

Greene had been an intelligence agent in World War 2, attempting to run agents into the Vichy colonies from Sierra Leone and later dealing with counter-espionage in Portugal, where those German Abwehr officers who hadn't yet been recruited by the British supplemented their modest incomes by sending erroneous reports back to an increasingly desperate Berlin. He had also seen the brutality of Batista's regime at first hand, propped up by foreign governments such as the British, who had sold jet planes to Cuba whilst denying any knowledge of repression o
r civil war. Greene's reportage of pre-Castro Havana is beautifully evocative, from the naked dancers at the Shanghai Club and the superstitions of the lottery draw to the pornographic postcards hanging in streets misted by sea spray, full of shabby hotels, crude colours and "pink, grey, yellow pillars...eroded like rocks." But domestic terror is something that is only ever spoken about; confined to a couple of stray bullets, curfews in the provinces, power cuts and "unpleasant doings out of sight."

Our Man In Havana is not so much a novel about Cuba as a novel about a Secret Service at once eccentric, ridiculous and lethal, card-index in one hand and revolver in the other. Hawthorne, Wormold's immediate superior, is the epitome of the effete Establishment - exclusive tie, stone-coloured suit, royal monogram on his silk pyjamas and cold, stiff air. The Chief, meticulous, romantic and fatally removed from everyday realities by his literary imagination, is more concerned with trumping the Americans and Naval Intelligence than verifying his agents' reports. Greene's ridicule is full of comic asides, from the French speaking secretary sent to a Spanish speaking country - "It's much the same. They're both Latin tongues" - to the lengthy admiration of the ingenious weapons that look just like two-way nozzles and snap action couplings and a farcical poisoning scene.

The book is more satirical than funny, the plot might be a little slow for some, and the characters in Greene's entertainments are never as memorable as in his more serious works. You won't find a Pinkie or a Harry Lime here, though Captain Segura, a humanized Captain Ventura (Batista's real life chief of police), carries a perceptive cynicism along with his human skin cigarette case, and Doctor Hasselbacher, a man of uncertain loyalties, sad and gentle, is well drawn and compelling, sitting in his uhlan uniform on the Kaiser&#
39;s birthday, infected with a fragile optimism and a shady past.

Our Man In Havana is certainly a topical read at the moment, the dodgy dossiers and dark actors as apt as ever even if the dangerous games between East and West have long since been played out. It's by no means Greene's best work, and I wouldn't recommend it as an introduction to the author, but it's still worth reading as a snapshot of Havana at the dangerous end of Batista's regime and a well aimed swipe at the absurdities of government sophistry and incompetence.

DETAILS

Published by Vintage Classics (224 pages). ISBN 0099286084.

£5.59 at amazon.co.uk.

Greene also scripted a film version of the book starring Alec Guinness as Wormold, Burl Ives as Dr Hasselbacher and Noel Coward as Hawthorne.

Summary: