“He had no accomplice, except the credulity of other men.” (166)“You should dream more. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.”(6)"Our Man in Havana" is a comic story about a vacuum salesman who sends concocted reports back to MI-6 and forwards schematics of enemy weapons that look vaguely familiar. “Our man in Havana has been turning out some pretty disquieting stuff lately.” James Wormold probably dreamt of a more distinguished destiny when he was younger, but he has now accepted the defeat dealt to him by life. A Briton living in Havana, he yearns to return home, but passivity and defeatism have caused him to abandon his dreams and invest all his hopes in his teenage daughter Milly. He feels himself part of the slow erosion of this dignified city where the ocean constantly batters El Malecon sea wall. Wormold’s wife left him long ago, and he serves as the doting, single parent of his fervid Catholic daughter. Yet, Wormold, a nonbeliever, is grateful to the Church, which has instilled in her a moral conscience that acts like an internal duenna (a chaperone-governess), an ally in protecting her virginity. Wormold could use a duenna himself. It is not that Wormold is more venal than average, rather, he spoils his Daughter, who says novenas imploring God for a horse and a country club membership. But lying comes more easily than expected to a man who claims that he prefers honesty over beauty. What will this passive man do when fate finally delivers an opportunity to profit from dishonesty? As his character unfolds, will he find his courage and resolve? Is he willing to go down gloriously for the truth or just admire it from afar?The novel was not particularly rich in sensory experience or loveable characters, but I loved Greene’s: 1) ideas; 2) prescience; and 3) humor.1. The Ideas Primacy of Individuals“At least if I could kill him, I would kill for a clean reason. I would kill to show that you can’t kill without being killed in your turn. I wouldn’t kill for my county. I wouldn’t kill for capitalism or communism or social democracy or the welfare state. A family-feud had been a better reason for murder than patriotism or the preference for one economic system over another. If I love or if I hate, let me love or hate as an individual. I will not be 59200/5 in anyone’s global war.” (193-4)NationalismWormold, speaking literally of rival vacuum manufacturers and metaphorically of the Cold War, says: There’s not much difference between the two machines any more than there is between two human beings. There would be no competition and no war if it wasn’t for the ambition of a few men in both firms; just a few men dictate competition and invent needs to [set each of us at the other’s throat].” (184) Greene’s heart is in the right place, on the side of the victim, but his plague-on-both- your-houses-mentality was, in my opinion, a fallacious exercise in moral equivalency that tends to permeate his political novels.Loyalty“I don’t care about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations.... I don’t think that even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood... but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?” (197) Later on, in a drunken checkers match, Wormold indiscriminately mixes different brands and types of hard liquor, symbolic of international blood-mixing.Torture “There are people who expect to be tortured and others who would be outraged by the idea. One never tortures except by a kind of mutual agreement.” (159) (These lines are spoken by Captain Segura, a satyr-like police-henchman of dictator Batista). The poor, Latin Americans, and “orientals,” are more “torturable” than tourists, Protestants, and Westerners– which are, collectively speaking, an apathetic lot toward the torturable class, unless prompted into action by Hitler, who was a promiscuous and equal opportunity torturer.Bullies“Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it....The cruel come and go like cities and thrones and powers, leaving their ruins behind them. They had no permanence.”(27-8) According to Christopher Hitchens’ introduction, Greene was bullied mercilessly in schools, and he named the villain of OMIH after his childhood tormentor. 2. PresciencePerhaps the plot of this book seemed comically far-fetched to its original readers in 1958, but Greene seems now like a prophet, given our knowledge of the failure of Western intelligence agencies in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I couldn’t help thinking of Ahmed Chalabi,“Curveball”, and nonexistent WMD. (Furthermore, at the end of OMIH, one of the characters is punished by being posted to Basra, Iraq– as if to say, Iraq is the next stop on the road to trouble.) Also, Greene wrote OMIH just before Castro ousted Batista and before Cuba would dominate American foreign policy during the Kennedy administration. The plot of OMIH involves a secret military installation in the Oriente Province and aerial surveillance that prefigures the surveillance that triggered the missle crisis in 1962. Finally, Greene wrote this anti-heroic spy novel at the same time that Ian Fleming was publishing his first novels about glamorous James Bond and before John Le Carré popularized and exposed the dark underbelly of Western espionage. As I mentioned in my review of Greene’s “The Quiet American,” Greene in 1954, debunked the domino theory of Southeast Asian communism and accurately predicted the USA's defeat in Vietnam a decade before the USA transitioned from advisors to combatants in South Vietnam.Although Greene was prescient about the missteps of the 1960's, one should judge carefully his overall political message. His careful and precise observations at the micro level are not automatically applicable at the macro level. He was dogmatically anti-American and suggested that Soviet hegemony would be no worse than the alternatives offered by NATO. Greene’s gifts of prophecy seemed to have failed him in his evaluation of the USSR's communist-totalitarian ideology that soon would have the good grace to expire of exhaustion upon the ash heap of history. 3. HumorFinally, alcohol and good humor are ever present throughout OMIH– to its great credit. Like the bloodstream of a disciplined drinker who imbibes early, slowly, and steadily throughout the day– keeping level and moderate BAC– so courses the humor throughout the story. Both the humor and the clinking glasses warmed the cockles of my heart as I read, giving me a convivial buzz.This review was written and first posted April 14, 2012. Here is a link to my review of Graham Greene's "The Quiet American."http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...April 14, 2012
This farce holds the same canny and clever delight as the Pink Panther, Dr. Strangelove and The Comedy of Errors, with dialogue and pacing to which David Mamet is clearly indebted. I could almost see the smoke from Graham Greene's typewriter keys swirling in the air as he tore through sheets of erasable bond, churning out this crazy, wonderful and utterly a propos satire of spies.It's the mid 1950's when we meet our man, Jim Wormold, a milquetoast British expatriate who moved to Havana prior to World War II, having escaped military service due to his bum leg. He is a sad sack salesman of vacuum cleaners, abandoned by the mother of his blossoming 17 yr old daughter, Milly, who is part sainted Madonna, part bombshell Marilyn. Wormold is inexplicably recruited as a spy by MI6- the British Secret Service- in a fabulous men's room encounter with scene stealer and smooth operator, Hawthorne (a.k.a 59200). Wormold marvels that he has been entrusted to spy- he has few contacts, fewer friends, is apolitical to the point of apathy, and bumbles awkwardly through his dull and lonely life. He is also broke and has a daughter whose demands score his guilty heart. This brief tale chronicles Wormold's adventures as a spy; ironically, he creates a network of sub-agents, unleashes a series of events that rock the intelligence world, and manages to build up his bank account with a tidy sum in the process. The butts of the joke are the British Secret Service and the cult of pop culture espionage. There are so many laugh-out-loud moments- I won't spoil by sharing- but this was a delicious read. It's not all fun and games, however; Greene may have intended a light-hearted comedy, but he reveals critical and extremely prescient observations about Cuba and the coming revolution and about the Cold War hysteria that damaged reputations and even destroyed the lives of innocent people who were identified as Communists or communist sympathizers. In light of the manipulation of military intelligence that led to the invasion of Iraq, his satire remains alive and relevant to this day. It is a true gift that a writer so associated with heavier themes of religious ambivalence, imperialism, and the universality of suffering, could toss those themes back with a wink and a giggle and wonderful readability.
What do You think about Our Man In Havana (1991)?
I fear I'm beginning to sound tiresome, raving about one Graham Greene novel after another. This one is truly remarkable, though. Wormold is one of Greene's more hapless heroes, a reluctant player in the Cold War spy game who begins manufacturing agents he's supposed to be running, dreaming them up the way a novelist dreams up characters. One of them is Teresa, whom he imagines as a nude dancer, the mistress simultaneously of the Minister of Defense and the Director of Posts and Telegraphs.Sometimes he was scared at the way these people grew in the dark without his knowledge. What was Teresa doing down there, out of sight? He didn't care to think. Her unabashed description of what life was like with her two lovers sometimes shocked him.He is in love with his creations, who lend excitement to his life. But then these fictional characters begin to meet their ends, "by accident," and poor Wormold loses control of his own story as the plotlines he's sketched out begin to unspool, and he gets caught up in some ugly business down in Cuba, but somehow Greene maintains his ironic sense of humor, and even manages some warmth, here and there.
—Lisa Lieberman
Even though this is one of Graham Greene's "entertainments", it is his own real employment with MI6 during WW2 that adds layers to this otherwise light hearted satire on the British Secret Service. Here Greene has written a story of a British citizen (Wormold) living in Havana in the early 1950s during the Batista regime. He is a dour middle aged vacuum cleaner salesman with a bombshell 16 year old daughter, Milly, whose burgeoning sexuality is at odds with her Catholic morality: something she has inherited from her mother who has run off with another man. Wormold is described by his daughter as a pagan. Milly is a high maintenance "princess", her demands on his finances makes an offer from Hawthorne of MI6 to become an "agent" irresistible. Soon Wormold is creating a complex yet hilarious series of reports for London of spy activities with fictional characters and drawings of vacuum cleaner attachments being passed off as sophisticated Russian atomic weaponry.It all starts to unravel when the fiction of his reports become a reality, with real versions of fictional characters being killed in mysterious circumstances. This is satire at its finest. Greene highlights beautifully the hypocrisy and deception of the spy "industry", given greater credence by virtue of Greene's own background in this life. Just as he foresaw the Americanisation of the Vietnam conflict in his classic, The Quiet American, here there are hints (this book was written in 1958) of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. This is a brilliant piece of work and I recommend it to anyone with a love of humorous, satirical spy tales with depth and a sense of history.
—Alex
This is a fun read, the story of an accidental spy. Mr Wormold (love that name) sells vacuum cleaners in Havana, not very successfully, until one day he is recruited by a British agent to work for his country while living in that no longer romantic foreign outpost. To be a secret agent! Well--the story takes off from there with a cast of slightly crazy characters: Wormold's religiously manipulative daughter Milly, Captain Segura the head of the local police who has mastered torture, locals of varying nationalities, and multiple members of the spy community. (It is with considered purpose I do not use the term intelligence to describe that community.)This is a great read that is timeless in it's message and story. Enjoy.Edited this morning to reflect my decision that this is a 5 star book.
—Sue
