A comic masterpiece
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I read this book when I was 16 and it was the funniest thing I had ever read. I remember being impressed at the range of Greene. Was this the same person who had written Brighton Rock?!
Having just read this book again, it's just as funny. It ranks up there with Three Men in a Boat. Strange how so much of it has stuck in my memory after all these years - little images, especially relating to Beatrice: the smell of her hair, her hands on the wheel of the car.
Wormold making his drawings of 'installations in the mountains' based on the insides of the vacumn cleaners he sells, and Hawthorne cringingly recognising them for what they are is just brilliant. Lots of other very funny moments abound. The dinner near the end is another highlight and is written in a masterful, filmic style reminiscent of The Great Gatsby.
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Something of an entertainment
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I've been working my way through the novels of Graham Greene for some time, and have found that a little goes a long way: the last one I read was "The Heart Of The Matter" a year or so ago, and found that story of unrelenting failure to be so unhappy that I wasn't keen to pick him up again for a while. By contrast, "Our Man In Havana" was classified by its author as an 'entertainment', and its style is somewhat more playful and ironic, although the central character is still weighed down by his struggles to make sense of his world. It's been pointed out elsewhere that Greene's stories have a habit of coming true in real life, and this cynical study of espionage in pre-revolutionary Cuba appears to epitomise that. For me, it had other resonances as the widely-acknowledged inspiration for John le Carre's 1996 novel "The Tailor Of Panama", which translated the plot about a thousand miles south, but retained the mordant humour of this odd little story.
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Fifties humour for Graham Greene buffs
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I disagree with other reviewers inasmuch as I consider Our Man in Havana to be principally for Graham Greene buffs. A dull English vacuum cleaner salesman in fifties Cuba is recruited into farcical espionage in a public toilet. He agrees to get involved in order to pay for the whims of his empty-headed daughter. For me, it has not stood the test of time that well as the humour is dated and the satire rather tame. Neither is it especially useful as a fictional document of the Cold War à la John Le Carré because the story is deliberately implausible. Batista's Cuba was a place of entrenched corruption and poverty but I did not really get the feel of the period or the place. I believe, though, that the impact of this novel has been diluted by time.
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A good book from a literary giant
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As one might expect from the title 'Our man in Havana' takes place in the humidity and depravity of cold war Cuba, and focuses on a merchant (Mr. Wormold) who, to his own bewilderment, is employed by the British Secret Service to be their eyes and ears in the province. The story follows wormold as his world spirals into chaos and his every action plunges him and his daughter further into danger.
The story was appealing to me as unlike many Graham Green novels the plot revelled in its simplicity and the lack of unnecessary complexity allowed the pace of the book to appeal to readers who may otherwise have considered Green too heavy going.
Another aspect of this particular book which separates it from the general Green genre is its humour. There is no farce or slapstick and only a couple of areas which make you laugh out loud but there is a thin thread of dry humour that runs throughout the book, even at times of tragedy or intrigue.
The characters and settings are fascinating and one can imagine a separate book for each character in their own right. The reader gets a sense that Green has created a life story for each personality, only a proportion of which made it onto the final edit.
One gets the feeling that Green wrote this book mainly as a comic relief for himself, away from his typically bleak novels. This could explain why the humour which is prevalent in the first half of the book gets blacker and diminishes later on, when the plot gets more serious. It is as if Green is unsure how to proceed with comedy in a darker period of the story. This is a drawback for me, as I would have preferred the humour to survive these difficult periods.
I would definitely recommend this book as it can appeal to many different tastes but also as it is an example of an established author writing outside his comfort zone and is additionally intriguing for that.
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Greene's most hilarious and most mordant entertainment.
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Gleefully combining the raucous humor of absurdity with slyly subtle wordplay and caustic satire, Greene entertains on every level, skewering British intelligence-gathering services during the Cold War. Setting the novel in the flamboyant atmosphere of pre-revolutionary Havana, where virtually anything can be had at a price, Greene establishes his contrasts and ironies early, creating a hilarious set piece which satirizes both the British government's never-satisfied desire for secrets about foreign political movements and their belief that the most banal of activities constitute threats to national security. Ex-patriot James Wormold is a mild-mannered, marginal businessman and vacuum cleaner salesman, whose spoiled teenage daughter sees herself as part of the equestrian and country club set. Approached by MI6 in a public restroom, Wormold finds himself unwillingly recruited to be "our man in Havana," a role which will reward him handsomely for information and allow him some much-needed financial breathing room. Encouraged to recruit other agents to provide more information (and earn even more money), he chooses names at random from the country club membership list and fabricates personas for them, featuring them in fictionalized little dramas which he churns out and forwards to his "handlers." Always careful to fulfill their expectations exactly, Wormold becomes a more and more important "spy," his stories become more creative, his "enemies" find him and his "agents" to be dangerous, and his friends and the real people whose names were used as fictional agents begin to turn up dead. Skewering British intelligence for being such willing dupes of a vacuum cleaner salesman who never wanted to be an agent in the first place, Greene betrays both his familiarity with the inner workings of the intelligence service, of which he was once a member, and his rejection of Cold War politics. In a conclusion which will satisfy everyone who has ever become impatient with political maneuvering, Greene carries the absurdities of power to their limits, orchestrating a grand finale which shows British politicians at their most venal--and most ridiculous. Ascerbic in its humor and delightfully refreshing in its choice of "hero," this novel is Greene at his very best. Mary Whipple
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