"Hail Mary, quite contrary", prays convent-educated Milly, aged four. Nine years later she sets fire to a small American boy called Thomas Earl Parkman Junior because he's a Protestant - "and if there was going to be a persecution, Catholics could always beat Protestants at that game."

An uncomfortable racial slur in the first sentence - a sign of the times, I suppose - but the rest was a bit of entertainment.

Jim Wormold, divorcé, lives in Havana with his pretty teenage daughter, Milly. He has one friend, Dr. Hasselbacher and struggles to make ends meet as a none-too-successful vacuum cleaner salesman. Then an unexpected person walks into his life—with what you might call an ‘opportunity too good to refuse’. He can become the undercover British Agent in Havana, watch for/report on suspicious activity, recruit his own agents, set up an expense account, and start earning that second income he so desperately needs.

The only trouble is Wormold is about as ill-suited to this line of work as an elephant for bead-work. He is a very shy man. Did I mention he only has one friend? This friend suggests he start inventing fake reports, imaginary agents and – by extension – an appropriate expense account. This solves Wormold’s financial shortages but causes all sorts of other problems especially when London becomes concerned that it is too much work for just one man and they send him a secretary and radio operator.

And then things get even worse as real people with the same names as Wormold’s fictitious agents start dying. Despite the murders, this is a very funny book! Dry humor, but really good! I especially liked the scenes where Wormold went to warn a couple of ‘agents’, their lives might be in danger. Greene was superb.

I half read, half listened to this book because I was so anxious to finish it. Hope to go back sometime and listen to the whole thing. An excellent reading of it!

I had so much fun reading this book … it is an espionage tale told with a deliciously witty British humor … laugh out loud funny …

Mr. Wormold is a middle-aged divorced man who manages a vacuum cleaner store in Havana in the 1950s … every day he meets his friend, Dr. Hasselbacher, at a bar for drinks … he has a teenage daughter who goes to Catholic school with a blithe devotion …

Then Hawthorne enters his life … he wants to recruit Mr. Wormold as a secret agent for the British Secret Service … reluctantly, he agrees, but all Wormold is interested in is earning and saving money for his daughter … he makes up profiles for his imaginary contacts in Cubs … the twist is that real secret agents have a list of his false contacts and have tried to murder each contact …

This book is steeped with sarcasm and irony, a gentle satire of the espionage genre … the characters are colorful and hilarious … the plot twists are brilliant and unexpected … a definite must-read, especially if you are a fan of wry British humor …

Entertaining.

Not only was Our Man in Havana a satirical allegory for the absurdity of Cold War espionage, it also felt like an allegory for the absurdity of being a paid author of fiction. The author makes stuff up and gets a paycheque for his efforts. Of course that wasn't the point of the book; desire begets desperation, the architects of war require building materials, war is bad and all that, but there seems to be an awareness that Greene himself is quite like his own antihero.

When reading Greene, one will always find references to his 'entertainment' fiction. Our Man in Havana falls into that category. What bothers me about that classification is one would have to assume anything outside that category is not entertaining. So would I read another of his books, knowing the author himself has flagged it as not entertaining? At the very least I would search out another of his entertainments for my entertainment.

Fun book. 3.5ish stars.

In Bernie Taupin’s autobiography Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton, and Me he talks about his love of books and in particular his reverence for the work of Graham Greene. I’d tried Greene once before: I’d listened to an audio version of his novella The Third Man . I didn’t really like it. It was so obviously a story sketched out ahead of his writing the screenplay for the iconic film. But I really admire Bernie, so why not give GG a second chance?

I’d spent some time researching which book to choose, and I finally went for this one as it looked like it ticked some boxes for me. I like stories set in warm climates, and I also enjoy the whole clandestine thing that this one seemed to promise. What I wasn’t prepared for was a whimsical tale of a bumbling agent – who didn’t want to be a spy at all – and a support cast full of hard to believe and even harder to stomach support players.

Maybe I’ve completely missed the point here, or perhaps it’s simply the age of the book that got to me. Either way, it really didn’t work for me. I gave up around a quarter of the way in. I think there may yet be a book out there that will make me feel differently about this writer, but it'll be some time before I give him another go.

I always give the same rating to books I fail to finish, so one star it is.

This is a frighteningly fun book - and I mean both of those words literally. Greene, with his usual cynical view of politics, takes us to post WWII Cuba, where life is gritty and often harsh. Our MC, James Wormold, is a British vacuum cleaner salesman and single father of teenager Milly. Finances are tight and not looking to get better when he is approached to spy for Britain. He accepts because his daughter has expensive taste and he needs the money.

Slight spoilers here -
The problem is, Wormold has no idea how to recruit spies, so he makes them up, collecting the money he's sent to pay his informants for Milly's education. He even fakes drawings of a secret installation in the mountains that the people back home become very worried about. Things become more and more complicated in the way of a farce. However, there's another part to this story. Young Milly loves horses and has secretly been spending time with a policeman who is also know to be a torturer, and uses a lighter covered with human skin. Thus we know that Wormold is mixing in deep waters, and in Greene's hands there's no guarantee he or Milly will make it out unharmed.

This mix of humor and threat kept me very involved in the story and worried about the everyone. Some characters we care about do die, and like Wormold, I had no idea how this would turn out until the very end. Speaking of the end - it left me feeling a bit flat, and that detracted some from my opinion of the story overall. Still it was a fascinating and entertaining that I'm very glad I finally picked it up.

"They haven't left us much to believe, have they? - even disbelief."

NB - The "N word shows up on page 1, and I don't think it was seen again.

- Greene worked for MI6 at one point, and apparently based Wormold on a Spanish double agent who did the same thing to the Germans. You know what they say about truth being stranger than fiction... And what is it about MI6 that created disillusioned agents who went on to write novels? There's even a cute line at the end of the book, "Too many people had written reminiscences lately of the Secret Service."

spoilers!


Uncorrected Transcript of Oral Evidence

Taken before the Intelligence and Security Committee Tuesday 15 July 1958

Members present:

Mr. Paul Anderson, in the Chair
Mr. Jonathan Blakeley
Mr. Richard Cunningham QC


Witnesses: MR. JAMES WORMOLD, O.B.E., former SIS operative in Havana, Cuba, 1955-1957; and MRS. BEATRICE WORMOLD (NEE SEVERN), formerly a secretary at the SIS headquarters.

Q1 Chairman: Mr. and Mrs. Wormold, may I welcome you to this hearing, which purpose is to examine the veracity of the contents of Dossier No. 1801 dated 24 October 1957 (hereinafter referred to as the Dossier), issued by the SIS or otherwise popularly known as the MI6. This Committee hopes that both of you will be able to shed light on certain events described in the Dossier, which have been challenged by other sources. Everything that transpires in this hearing shall be treated as a matter of national security and be held in the strictest confidence. Let me start with the first question: Mr. Wormold, is it true that you were recruited by an SIS agent, who went under the name of Hawthorne, in Havana during the winter of 1955?

Mr. Wormold: It is true, sir.

Q2 Chairman: Please describe the recruitment process.

Mr. Wormold: I was drinking with my old friend Dr. Hassellbacher at Sloppy Joe’s. Agent Hawthorne was there. He corralled me into the Gents and suggested to me that I should join the Secret Service.

Q3 Chairman: Any particular reason why the deed was done in the Gents?

Mr. Wormold: Uh --- I don’t know, sir. He said that it’s more secure in case anyone barged in. He kept the tap running while speaking to me, to confuse the mike, he said. I said I didn’t want the job, but he insisted. Then he shoved me into a closet and walked away.

Q4 Mr. Cunningham: Did he give you any reason for your recruitment?

Mr. Wormold: Yes, sir. He said that I was a patriotic Englishman who had been living in Havana for years, besides being a respected member of the European Traders Association. He also said that they must have their man in Havana, and that submarines need fuel and dictators drift together. I didn’t quite catch his drift then, sir.

Q5 Mr. Cunningham: What kind of business did you run in Havana, Mr. Wormold?

Mr. Wormold: I ran a vacuum cleaner shop, sir. We carry the finest, most modern machines such as the Atomic Pile Suction Cleaner, the Midget Make-Easy Air Powered Suction Small Home Cleaner and the Turbo, which is the no. 1 brand in Cuba for four years running. We are Phastkleaners’ sole agent for the whole of Cuba.

Q6 Mr. Blakeley: The Dossier describes you as a “well-connected merchant king with a substantial machinery importing business.” How many persons were employed in your business, Mr. Wormold?

Mr. Wormold: One, sir. It was just a small store.

Mr. Blakeley: Interesting. The Dossier also describes you as “stable”, and “uninterested in women.”

Mrs. Wormold: (snickers)

Chairman: Mrs. Wormold, we respectfully ask you not to speak until requested to do so.

Q6 Mr. Cunningham: Mr. Wormold, you initially refused the job, why did you change your mind?

Mr. Wormold: It was because of my daughter, Milly. She was just sixteen at that time. Convent schoolgirl, very good girl. She wanted to buy a horse and rode in the Country Club. The horse alone costed 300 pounds, sir, and the Country Club was even more expensive. Not to say of the bridles, saddles and riding lessons. And I wanted to have enough money to retire in England and take her with me. There was this native person called Capt. Segura who had designs on her.

Q7 Mr. Blakeley: Isn’t he the head of police in Vedado?

Mr. Wormold: The one and the same. Do you know what people in Havana call him, sir? The Red Vulture. He tortured prisoners. He had a wallet made of human skin. This person wanted to marry my daughter. You see, I had to get her out of Cuba. Pronto!

Mrs. Wormold: He is such a good father!

Chairman:: Mrs. Wormold ---

Mrs. Wormold: Not to speak until spoken to. Understood.

Q8 Mr. Cunningham: The Dossier records that you received a lump sum payment of 1,000 pounds in April 1956. Could you confirm what the funds were used for?

Mr. Wormold: To join the Country Club and recruit several sub-agents.

Q9 Mr. Cunningham: Engineer Cifuentes, Professor Luis Sanchez and Lopez. Who’s Lopez?

Mr. Wormold: My employee at the store. He wanted an additional 25 pesos per month. The other two names were from the Country Club’s roster. I had to justify the payments.

Q 10 Mr. Cunningham: I see. And the transfer of 1,500 dollars in June 1956 was for what purpose?

Mr. Wormold: To procure intelligence reports and drawings of the secret military installations in the mountains of Oriente Province.

Chairman: These are the drawings, gentlemen. According to the Dossier, these depict the parts of a massive weapon of mass destruction, very possibly nuclear.

Mrs. Wormold: Actually, those were the drawings of the parts of the Atomic Pile Suction vacuum cleaner.

Q11 Chairman: Is that true, Mr. Wormold?

Mr. Wormold: Uh yes, sir.

Q12 Chairman: Who made them, Mr. Wormold?

Mr. Wormold: I did, sir. I took the Atomic Pile apart and drew the parts. Then I altered the scale to make them seem gigantic.

Mr. Blakeley: He had even drew a little man with a bowler hat next to the drawings --- see?

Chairman: How did these absurd drawings got through the experts at the SIS?

Mr. Blakeley: To be fair, this particular drawing here does look like some kind of a massive cannon bore.

Mrs. Wormold: It’s a drawing of the Atomic Pile’s nozzle. I love it that Jim could be so devious!

Q13 Chairman: Since you seem to be exceedingly eager to speak, Mrs. Wormold, let’s commence with your part. Who sent you to Havana?

Mrs. Wormold: Miss Jenkinson, sir. The head of the secretarial pool at the SIS HQ. Agent Hawthorne specifically requested a Spanish-speaking secretary for the assignment.

Q14 Chairman: Did you speak Spanish? Did you have any other abilities that might have been useful there?

Mrs. Wormold: No Spanish, but I’m half French. At the SIS, they think that all Latin tongues are the same anyway. I could encode and do microphotography. I also have a good knowledge of electrodynamics.

Q15 Mr. Blakeley: What’s that?

Mrs. Wormold: Let’s just say that if you have any trouble with your fuse box at home, you can give me a call.

Mr. Blakeley: Er --- all right.

Q16 Mr. Cunningham: What happened when you arrived in Havana? Did Mr. Wormold’s activities as an agent seemed suspicious to you from the start?

Mrs. Wormold: We first met at the Copacabana --- it was so romantic --- all those palm trees, the Parisian songs, the cabaret…

Chairman: Please answer Mr. Cunningham’s questions, Mrs. Wormold.

Mrs. Wormold: Where were we? Oh yes, I was not suspicious at first. I thought that he was kind of bumbling, but what a sweet man! And then someone shot at Cifuentes and everything started to unravel. He took me to the Shanghai Theater to warn Teresa ---

Mr. Blakeley: One of the alleged sub-agents, a “nude dancer who is the mistress of both the Minister of Mines and the Director of Post & Telegraph.”

Mrs. Wormold: That’s the girl. We got her into Jim’s car and we rode to Professor Sanchez’s house to warn him too ---

Q17 Mr. Blakeley: Is this the incident described in the police report attached to the Dossier, in which Mr. Wormold was arrested for driving around with a naked girl and breaking into Professor Sanchez’s home?

Mrs. Wormold: Yes. It was quite funny, actually. It was a total farce. I wished that he had just told me, though. No need for all that merry go round --- right, darling?

Mr. Blakeley: Apparently, there were other murky incidents after that --- it’s rather difficult to understand what actually happened from the Dossier. But at the end Mr. Wormold successfully eliminated several suspected enemy operatives while providing us with an invaluable list of foreign agents.

Mr. Cunningham: May I point out that Mr. Wormold could not be charged under the Official Secrets Act as he hadn’t actually given any secrets away? He invented secrets, and such an act is not covered by the OSA.

Chairman: I think that I can speak for this Committee --- on the balance, Mr. and Mrs. Wormold’s actions had brought us more benefits than disadvantages, although it must be said that we have some concerns about the sheer amount of invention that was involved. But such is the nature of intelligence work. It is in our national interest that we concur with the conclusion of the SIS’ internal inquiry: Mr. Wormold deserves his O.B.E., and Mrs. Wormold does not deserve to be sent to Jakarta.

Mr. Blakeley and Mr. Cunningham: We agree.

Mr. Wormold: May I say something, sir?

Chairman: Certainly, Mr. Wormold.

Mr. Wormold: This is the lesson that I’ve learned from all of this. The cruel come and go like cities and thrones and powers. They have no permanence. But the clown whom I had seen last year with my daughter at the circus --- that clown is permanent, for his act never change.That is the way to live: the clown is unaffected by the vagaries of public and the enormous discoveries of the great.

Chairman: Umm, yes. Quite an interesting sentiment. Is that all?

Mr. Wormold: One more: thou shalt not invent a weapon of mass destruction where there is none.

Chairman: I agree. May I thank you on behalf of the Committee? You both have been most helpful.

End of Transcript

My third and favorite Graham Greene book. He may now be my favorite novelist. I didn't care for the opening so don't let that slow you down if you've already poked your toe in.

I don't know man, it was a real pleasure, kept me guessing in a calm way, and was just very British (good).

Ο Γκράχαμ Γκριν, λέει, κατηγοριοποιούσε τις ιστορίες του σε καθαρά λογοτεχνιάζουσες και σε ψυχαγωγικές.

Δεν ξέρω για αυτόν τον διαχωρισμό, ξέρω όμως το εξής: βρίθει λογοτεχνικότητας, καυστικότητας, απολαυστικών διαλόγων. Έχει χιούμορ ίσως παραπάνω από άλλες του ιστορίες, μα αυτό αποτελεί ένα κοινό γνώρισμά της γραφής του. Ίσως έχει και παραπάνω δράση, αν και δεν είναι πτυχή άγνωστη στα βιβλία του - απεναντίας. Ίσως το συγκεκριμένο βιβλίο κάποιος να το χαρακτήριζε φάρσα. Πάντως είναι ένα εξαιρετικό μυθιστόρημα, τρομακτικά προφητικό. Γραμμένο ένα μόλις χρόνο πριν ανέβει στην εξουσία ο Κάστρο, αποτελεί μια γκάφα ολκής, καθώς ο απεγνωσμένος πωλητής ηλεκτρικών σκουπών Γουόρμολντ δέχεται να γίνει κατάσκοπος της ΜΙ6, μόνο για τις απολαβές που θα τον βοηθήσουν να ικανοποιεί τα καπρίτσια της κόρης του. Από εκεί και πέρα ξεκινάει μια ιστορία που ποτέ δεν αποκλίνει σε φτηνές υπερβολές καταφέρνοντας να είναι πάντα έξυπνη, απρόβλεπτη, απίστευτα αστεία, απολαυστικά σκερτσόζα και εμβριθής.


Η Κούβα, η κατασκοπεία, το καθεστώς προ της -προφητικής- κατάρρευσής του, το κλίμα, τα κτίρια - όλα ζωντανεύουν μπροστά στα μάτια του αναγνώστη. Μιλάμε για ανάγνωσμα με όλη την έννοια της λέξης. Το ανοίγεις, ξεκινάς στην πρώτη σελίδα και δεν μπορείς να καταλάβεις για πότε βρέθηκες στην τελευταία.

Καλή ανάγνωση!

“Our Nebbish in Havana”

•nebbish: (noun) a person, especially a man, who is regarded as pitifully ineffectual, timid, or submissive.
(Sense 2) : the character of Jim Wormold in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana.


At first squint, Graham Greene’s 1958 novel Our Man in Havana is what a compulsively classification-minded person might mark down as a conventional Cold War-era “spy novel.” But don’t let such stolid—not to mention massively insufficient—assignations fool you. This book is much, much more than your typical espionage thriller.

About one part Le Carré, the rest is a romping and delirious admixture of styles, including everything from Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle to Heller’s Catch-22 to Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (all of which—fairly amazingly—were actually predated by Greene’s classic romp). There’s also a hot dash of William S. Burroughs’s unique blend of eccentric screwball intensity and marauding insanity chucked in, just for good measure.

This is a scathingly satirical, absurd, hilarious, but also surprisingly prescient accounting of Khrushchev-era Cold War spy games—most notably presaging that terrifying comedy of errors that we call the Cuban Missile Crisis, which unfolded just a few years after Our Man was published and which eerily mirrors the acidic fruits of Graham Greene’s keen imagination in myriad and disturbing ways…

133rd book of 2020.
n  

‘I don’t give a damn about men who are loyal to the people who pay them, to organisations… 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?’

n
This is my 10th Greene novel. It is one of his “entertainments” which he named himself, and they are precisely that – entertainments. This is one of said books. A vacuum cleaner salesman becomes spy; he has a daughter who spends too much money, and he has no money. The backdrop – Havana. (Hence the beautiful car on this edition’s cover.) With humour, a smattering of tension and glimpses of Greene’s incredible writing (which he saves for his more literary novels), it is no surprise I read it in 2 days.

Greene consistently brings good entertainment (good novels), as I continue to read through his oeuvre. He has charm and wit – what more does one want from an Englishman, I wonder?