4.5 stars

Review to follow

“You should dream more, Mr Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.”

Two old friends meet every day for drinks on their lunch break, in the city of Havana, on the eve of a revolution.
Dr Hasselbacher is listening to the complaints of Mr. Wormold, the sales representative for the Phastkleaners company in Cuba: his business is going nowhere, his daughter is spending more than he earns, his wife has left him and there is no point to his existence.
Mr Wormold is about to discover that he is actually living in interesting times, as defined in an old Chinese curse.

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This is the funniest novel by Graham Greene that I have read so far. He has a great sense of timing in witty repartee and in screwball situations, but the major note of the story is satirical. These barbed arrows are aimed directly at the secret services of various nations engaged in the Cold War and in particular at the British spies, of which secret organizations the author was himself a member. So I can trust him that he knows what he is talking about when he exposes the incompetence, the arrogance and the self delusions that resulted in so many internal scandals.

Briefly, the vacuum cleaners salesman is approached by a posh agent from London and offered a job to spy for his country. Wormold initially refuses, citing his lack of expertise, but confronted with the immoderate spending by his teenage daughter Milly, he accepts to set up a Havana station and to recruit his own local agents.

Wormold, a shy and rather transparent man, must now learn how to deceive. And his first choice is to deceive his new employers by creating fictional agents and writing fictional reports – an extremely tangled web. He gets so caught in the game of make believe and so creative with his expense accounts that very soon his reports from Havana have the higher up rajahs in London up in arms with rumours of secret bases and military build-ups.

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 a light on and there they were, frozen in some characteristic action.

Well pleased with their man in Havana, these rajahs decide to expand his operation and to send over a secretary and a radio operator to Wormold, threatening his carefully build yet teetering house of cards.

Can we write human beings into existence? And what sort of existence? Had Shakespeare listened to the news of Duncan’s death in a tavern or heard the knocking on his own bedroom door after he had finished the writing of Macbeth?

Oh, and did I mention that his daughter Milly is ‘dating’ a captain in the secret police of Batista, a man who sports a leather case for cigarettes made out of human skin?

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I should stop now revealing more of the intricacies of the plot. It’s true that I laughed out loud more than once at the troubles Wormold tries to extricate himself from, but this is Graham Greene we are talking about here: even when he writes ‘entertainments’, he knows how to touch on much deeper themes than a standard slapstick comedy.

They both laughed, drinking daiquiries. It is easy to laugh at the idea of torture on a sunny day.

It’s all fun and games until someone looses an eye, and the cloak and dagger business is one of the dirtiest ones around. Wormold thought he can fool around with make believe agents, but when his reports get taken seriously in the offices of different powers around the globe, real people get hurt. I’m not naming names, but some people very close to our salesman are targeted and he himself is thrown to the wolves.

‘We should all be clowns, Milly. Don’t ever learn from experience.’

Serious people start wars and build atomic bombs and torture innocent people. Wormold is making faces in the mirror, trying to find something to laugh about, but his reality is getting harder and harder to face, just as his friend Hasselbacher warned.
The solution found by the author is extremely clever, and funny in that classic Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton way: with a tear rolling down your cheek. It really makes the reader think about the sort of things we are laughing at. And ask ourselves where do we go from here, what have we learned from the experience?

Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?

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The review is finished, but I still have a couple of bookmarks about young Milly, my favorite troublesome teenager and a much smarter kid than we give her credit for.

‘Why did you set fire to Earl?’
‘I was tempted by the devil,’ she said.
‘Milly, please be sensible.’
‘Saints have been tempted by the devil.’
‘You are not a saint.’
‘Exactly. That’s why I fell.’

- - - - -
He could distinguish the approach of Milly like that of a police-car from a long way off. Whistles instead of sirens warned him of her coming. She was accustomed to walk from the bus stop in the Avenida de Belgica, but today the wolves seemed to be operating from the direction of Compostella.

***SPOILERS ALERT***

Our Man in Havana is a satirical spy novel set in Havana during the cold war. British influence over the rest of the world is on the wane. An alcoholic British expatriate Jim Wormold - who owns a shop that sells vacuum cleaners is hired by a British intelligence agency as their man (spy) in Havana.

Wormold is a lot like Henry Scobie in Greene's The Heart of the Matter. He is a middle aged man who does not know what he is to do with the rest of his life. How will he go on? How will he fund the exorbitant lifestyle of his Catholic daughter Milly? He drifts through life, drinking daiquiris with another dejected British expatriate Dr. Hasselbacher at Havana's numerous bars. But when he is assigned the job of a spy by Hawthorne (the British intelligence agent who arrives as a customer at Wormold's shop), there is something to do. He begins to make money. He makes up fake events and people in his dispatches to the intelligence agency. But then his dispatches begin to come true.

I think Wormold and Hasselbacher represent post-war Britain - tired and without any motive or passion to go on, conceding hegemony to America. But I doubt whether Greene was a patriot. His attitude could be reflected in these lines by Wormold - “I don't care a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organizations...I don't think even my country means all that much. There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?”

Our Man in Havana is filled with poignant similes and comedic set pieces. But one setpiece where a rival agent tried to poison Wormold at a trade meeting does not really work. The book's second half does not really measure upto its first half.

The sheer absurdity of the intelligence agencies activities is captured perfectly by Greene especially in the scenes towards the end where Wormold is bestowed with a teaching post at the agency despite him running circles around them.

While this book is classified as one of Greene's entertainments, Wormold's predicament is quite depressing. It is a predicament that most of us might face at some point in our lives - especially the middle aged. What are we to do with our lives? How are we to go on in this modern world? I recently watched Trainspotting 2 and the middle aged Mark Renton who has just had a heart surgery has the same question - "They told me I am going to be allright for the next thirty years but what they did not tell me was what I'm supposed to do with those thirty years."

Quite an entertaining and effective satire of cold war era espionage, and even war more generally. Greene so seamlessly mixes up the farcical and humorous with genuine tension and suspense that one becomes unsure of which is which, making it all the more absurd.

Graham Greene always amazed me as he wrote about topical subjects before they became topical.

It's a funny thing. I read this book several decades ago along with all the other Graham Greene books (the Paul Hogarth illustrated covers series by Penguin). Then last week a local theatre company put on this play so I couldn't resist. To be honest I vaguely remembered this story. At times I thought it seemed a little dated (now it's a period piece) but the mixture of black humour and Greene's plot line lived up to its category - an entertainment.

The funny thing is that it is all about fake news. Set in 1958 Havana, a vacuum salesman is offered to work as an MI6 spy for the British. Why? Wormold needs the money - his daughter is turning 17 and the expenses are growing. The British wanted to keep tabs on the communist rebels and establish a spy base in the Caribbean. Throw in Wormold's German friend Dr. Hasselbacher (which side is he on, East or West?), Beatrice, a secretary for the love interest, Lopez, a dry-humour local who works in the vacuum shop and Captain Segura, the terrifying police officer who wants to marry Wormold's daughter and the entertainment factor is set.

To create the scam, Dr. Hasselbacher suggests that he just make up the stories to get payment from MI6. No one gets hurt and you get some extra cash. This sounds easy except when one of his fictitious characters actually dies, the scam begins to unravel and Wormold digs himself deeper.

Graham Greene is all about timing. Our Man in Havana came out just months before the Cuban Revolution started. The political intrigue is always there. Greene plays down the middle, not choosing sides. It is an entertainment, so it doesn't get too deep, too dark at times and you won't walk away enlightened. The play was fun; the book was enjoyable. Kudos to the playwright, because he lifted the script to a tee.

One of the most memorable scenes is the checkers game between Captain Segura and Wormold, played with mini bottles of Scotch and Bourbon. Winner gets to drink the other's. And we know where this is going! Just pure pandemonium.

So good to read once again.

Originally read May 1984.

Not a bad book by any means, but the 150-page set-up seemed to be really excessive when compared to the 50-page climax. Overall, it was a clever, humorous take on the ultra-serious world of international espionage. I don't say this very often (ever?), but I think this book would have worked better as a short story.

Wormold is a vacuum cleaner salesman based in Havana. He gets approached to be a British spy. His daughter wants a horse and well, the vacuum cleaner business isn't going so well. The espionage gig pays better, so Wormold says yes. His daughter gets her horse. Hijinks ensue.

"An Entertainment" describes the novel very well. It had me laughing out loud with glee. A rollicking well-paced satire on espionage and patriotism with a surprisingly sobering and heartfelt ending.

A great story: light entertainment. I read this during my commute.

I’m dnfing this book because I’m worried that it’s going to effect my mental health because one of the characters is experiencing something similar to what I have. I also didn’t like the racist and anti American sentiments in the book but I realize that it’s considered normal for the time period it’s written in.

I absolutely enjoyed everything else about it which is why I rated it 3 stars instead of 2 stars.

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Warning - contains some spoilers.

GG was being far too modest in labeling this novel "an entertainment," suggesting it's something lesser than serious literature. Though the premise -- appliance salesman recuited to be spy in Havana makes up false reports for money to support daughter -- is certainly a humorous and entertaining one, the humor turns surprisingly dark, as innocent characters end up dying as a result of his ridiculous ruse. GG captures the absurd logic and paranoia of Cold War atmosphere almost as well as he does in The Quiet American (which he did not consider a mere "entertainment). In some ways, I found this work more disturbing than TQA because the humor kept you off balance, as the tone makes sudden shifts into dark menace that remind you how quickly seemingly innocent absurdity can plunge into deadly violence. This was much better book than I had anticipated. Nicholas Kristoff of NYT called it a "mindful page-turner," and that seems like an apt description.

One of Graham Greene's lighter novels, Our Man in Havana is a comic spy caper about a stuffy Englishman's misadventures in Batista's Cuba. Jim Wormold is a nondescript vacuum cleaner salesman whose greatest concern is his daughter Millie's spending habits. At least, until he's contacted by an English intelligence agent who recruits him to spy on Havana's elite. Having few connections but needing the money, Wormold agrees, fabricating an elaborate charade of imaginary agents, Shakespearean code phrases and phony weapons systems which fools his superiors. Unfortunately his farce also catches the attention of Cuba's security forces, with Wormold's associates mysteriously dying and the salesman targeted by secret policeman Segura, a brutal captain with a penchant for torture and a weakness for Wormold's daughter. Greene, writing soon before the rise of Fidel Castro, sketches 1950s Cuba as a no-man's land for ne'er-do-wells, far seedier even than Hemingway imagined. Riddled with guilt (Catholic or otherwise, in Wormold's case) his protagonists can't even enjoy Havana's debauches, instead finding ways to keep alive and out of trouble. The book evinces Greene's cynical view of the Cold War as a charade, with British and American intelligence services so compartmentalized that they can't share basic information - and so clammed-up that Wormold's handlers have no trouble accepting his outlandish tales. Greene successfully weaves in coarse irony as Wormold's spy games thrust innocent people into the crosshairs, and his alcoholic checkers game with the seedy Segura achieve a nice mix of suspense and silliness. But Greene's attempts to inject gravitas with an aged, alcoholic German who speaks in epigrams feels less successful, as he's too earnest for the story around him, nor does Wormold's secretary Beatrice amount to much as a character. The plot itself fizzles out in anticlimax, though given the set-up how could it not? But the balance of the book is a delightful work of satire, an "entertainment" that feels more colorful and intelligent than most "serious" works of spy fiction. Carol Reed adapted this into a film starring Alec Guinness and Maureen O'Hara, which is reasonably faithful but doesn't quite capture Greene's dry, sickly humor.