Graham Greene: Our Man in Havana

[Sybarite]

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

Another novel (like The Great Gatsby earlier this summer) that I managed to come to without having read any other work by the author or having seen the film version.

James Wormold is a single parent running a vacuum cleaner shop in Havana, Cuba, in the last days of the Batista regime. With trade gradually failing, he desperately needs money to grant his 17-year-old daughter Milly's wishes and ensure that she has a future beyond the island.

Approached by a pushy Englishman called Hawthorne, Wormold finds himself recruited by the British secret service – "our man in Havana" – with funds for himself and promises of more for any agents that he himself recruits.

But Wormold has no contacts and no knowledge or interest of what is happening in the country. Finally called upon to start justifying his new income, he starts concocting reports for London.

And that's where the trouble really starts.

Graham Greene himself joined the Secret Intelligence Service (which became MI6) in 1941, and the novel is largely a satire on intelligence services in general and British intelligence in particular.

There's an element of tragedy in the farce – that of the innocent dying as Wormold's creative reports take on a life of their own – but there's plenty of humour that leaves one smiling. And ultimately the biggest laugh is the denouement – how the British intelligence services decide to deal with the knowledge that they've been conned.

It's funny and wry, and it's interesting that, with the benefit of internal experience, Greene seems to view the intelligence services as part of the problem rather than the solution. Very entertaining and with a nice bite to it.

• The idea of invented reports from a spy turned up again in John le Carré's 1996 novel The Tailor of Panama, where Harry Pendel wants to keep the money flowing from British intelligence.

 

[Writer44]

Found both books you mentioned dusty dry, plodding, and not very interesting.

 

[RonPrice]

More on Graham Greene

This thread has not been active for some time, but I will post More on Graham Greene and hope my comment finds some interest among readers.-Ron in Tasmania
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A BURNT-OUT CASE

SBS TV showed the docudrama Lamumba two nights ago, on the evening of 30 July 2010. I had never really got a handle on the events of the historical crisis associated with the legendary African leader Patrice Lamumba, events which took place when I was in my mid-teens. Lumumba is a 2000 film directed by the award-winning Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck(b. 1953). It is centred around Patrice Lumumba in the months before and after the Democratic Republic of the Congo achieved independence from Belgium in June 1960. Raoul Peck's film is a coproduction of France, Belgium, Germany, and Haiti. Lumumba dramatises the rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba. In late October 1959, just days after I joined the Baha’i Faith at the age of 15, Lumumba was arrested for allegedly inciting an anti-colonial riot in the city of Stanleyville where thirty people were killed. He was sentenced to six months in prison. His name was just a news item on the distant periphery of my life, immersed as I was in a smalltown culture in the 1950s, in Ontario Canada.

The plot of this docudrama is based on the final months of the life of Patrice Lumumba in his role as the first Prime Minister of the Congo. His tenure in office lasted two months until he was driven from office in September 1960. Joseph Kasavubu was sworn in alongside Lumumba as the first president of the country, and together they attempted to prevent the Congo succumbing to secession and anarchy. The film concluded with the army chief-of-staff, Joseph Mobutu, seizing power in a CIA sponsored coup.-Ron Price with thanks to SBS TV, “Lamumba,” 30 July 2010.

Graham Greene went to Belgian Congo in January 1959, just before the Congo crisis broke out, with a new novel already beginning to form in his head by way of a situation involving a stranger who turned up in a remote leper settlement for no apparent reason. While Greene was writing A Burnt-Out Case in 1959 in the months leading up to and after I became a member of the Baha’i Faith. This novel is one of those in the running for the most depressing narratives ever written. The reader only has to endure for a short time the company of the burnt-out character whose name in the novel was Querry. Greene had to live with him and in him--in his head--for eighteen months.

Greene wrote that: “Success as a novelist is often more dangerous than failure; the ripples often break over a wider coast line. The Heart of the Matter(1948) was a success in the great vulgar sense of that term. There must have been something corrupt there, for the book appealed too often to weak elements in its readers. Never had I received so many letters from strangers, perhaps the majority of them from women and priests. At a stroke I found myself regarded as a Catholic author in England, Europe and America -- the last title to which I had ever aspired. This account may seem cynical and unfeeling, but in the years between The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair(1951) I felt myself used and exhausted by the victims of religion. The vision of faith as untroubled sea was lost for ever; faith was more like a tempest in which the lucky were engulfed and lost, and the unfortunate survived to be flung battered and bleeding on the shore. A better man could have found a life's work on the margin of that cruel sea, but my own course of life gave me no confidence in any aid I might proffer. I had no apostolic mission, and the cries for spiritual assistance maddened me because of my impotence. What was the Church for but to aid these sufferers? What was the priesthood for? I was like a man without medical knowledge in a village struck with plague. It was in those years, I think, that Querry was born, and Father Thomas too. He had often sat in that chair of mine, and he had worn many faces.”

I was never much of a reader of novels,
but in the 1990s I became a teacher of
English lit to matriculants and A Burnt-
Out Case, a book Greene wrote when I
was just getting into life, and a life which
would also make me one of those burnt-out
cases. Greene’s book was on a curriculum
as I was getting near the end of a teaching
career and only beginning to discover his
perpetually grey and disturbing Greenland.1

1 Matthew Price, Sinner Take All: Graham Greene’s Damned Redemption, Book Forum, Oct/Nov 2004.

Ron Price
1 August 2010

 

[chiangmaifalcon]

I am currently reading Graham Greene book. The Quiet American. I can relate to it as I live in Southeast Asia, and am married to Thai woman who was born in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge genocide which followed the Vietnam War. I have seen the movie 3 times and it is one of my favorite movies, but never read book before. The story is somewhat anti-American, and to an extent even anti-British, though perhaps to be honest there is some truth to the story. It is a great book but my only complaint is that the character of Pyle who is the quiet American of the title is too naive to be believable, and the dialogue of the characters is also unrealistic to me.

 

[753C]

Graham Greene has always been sort of hit or miss with me. I love some of his stories but others don't move me too much. Heart of the Matter was the one I liked the most and I enjoyed it so much that I have re-read it several times. The quiet american was pretty good too.

 

[chiangmaifalcon]

I am going to library today and will look for other Graham Greene books. I never read Our Man in Havana but did see the movie years ago, though I cannot remember much about it except the star was Alec Guinness. I also liked The Tailor of Panama. Both the book and the movie. My favorite LeCarre novel and perhaps my favorite spy novel is The Honourable Schoolboy, also by Le Carre.