Customer Reviews

After Havana: A Novel

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In 1958 American expatriate Pete Deacon hides in Cuba from powerful mobsters and business moguls though he sees no difference between the two groups wanting to harm him. Pete loves to play the trumpet and misses his beloved Anita, lost as a byproduct of the IVORY COAST fiasco. His foes want a piece of his butt and own Anita but Pete knows there is nothing he can do except hide his body in Cuba and his mind with alcohol.

To further disguise himself, Pete, who has been in Havana for three years, uses the name Sloan and plays a substitute at best trumpet, a coronet, as part of a jazz band at the Tropicana. However, as is the luck of Pete by any name, Anita escorted by tycoon Nick Calloway enters the Tropicana. Surprisingly, Nick cherishes Anita perhaps as much as Pete treasures her. When the rebels abduct Anita, a weird assortment of allies try to rescue her. However the hills are alive with the sound of treachery, hidden agendas, and double dealing led by American Fed Cardoso as an assassination plot to keep Batista in power unfolds.

This is an exciting historical thriller that brings to life Cuba just prior to the Castro revolution. The story line is exciting, but it is the host of characters kept focused by Pete that makes the era seem so vividly alive. Fans will appreciate this amoral tale in which the results mean everything so double dealing is acceptable by almost every participant, which makes the ethical Pete seem sadly naive. Charles Fleming will have a difficult time keeping the quality as high AFTER HAVANA and the IVORY COAST.

Harriet Klausner

If you liked Ivory Coast, After Havana is essential reading. Fleming's rich, textured narrative takes us from the emerging world of Vegas to the imploding hell of Cuba in 1958. The story moves at a relentless pace, taking us to bars in Havana, rebel mountain strongholds, and the minds of several desperate, all too human characters. Fleming's second novel confirms that he has the talent and imagination to enrich our lives for years to come.

This talented writer weaves a suspenseful thriller set in 1958 Cuba at the brink of the Castro revolution. Charles Fleming tells a passionate story of separated lovers first introduced in IVORY COAST. Anita and Sloan strive to reunite against a background of vivid police atrocities, sleazy Havana bars, political rebellion, lavish casinos and an array of extraordinarily sordid characters. Replete with excitement, history, mystery and romance, this novel is a gift for those seeking the thrill of crime fiction.

I don't know why, but this book left me flat.

I am favorably disposed to like thrillers and crime novels with foreign or historical settings, so I picked this up with some excitement. The author certainly has a gift for detail, so the descriptions of Havana, and Cuba more generally, were done very nicely. I have no idea whether they were accurate since I have been there, but they were certainly vivid. And the plotting, while intricate, was quite nice, and kept things going. Several elements of the plotting were very nice, and reminded me of something out of Graham Greene, in that key developments often arose very plausibly as the result of bungling or misunderstandings. So I liked all of this.

For some reason, however, I had to struggle to finish. The problem I had is that I found the main characters strangely flat and uninteresting. Somewhere alone the line, I simply found Sloan, Calloway, and Anita dull. I lost interest in what happened to them. Anita was especially dull. Delgado and Mo were somewhat more interesting. The problem for me, I think, was that the main characters all seemed intended as representatives of particular types, and they were set in motion at the beginning of the story, and pretty much rolled through the rest of the story without growing or changing. They were essentially the same characters at the end of the story as at the beginning, except that a bunch of stuff had happened to them. Indeed, they came across like stock characters from a noir mystery: a tortured artist, a beauty, a gangster, rich entrepreneur, and in the case of Delgado, a revolutionary hero. I guess most noir novels don't have Cuban revolutionaries, but even Delgado seemed flat. To me, at least, Cardoso was probably the most interesting because some depth and complexity emerged over the course of the story. I have the same reactions to the characters in Alan Furst's novels, so maybe it is just me. Oddly, side characters who appeared only occasionally, or in some cases only once, were much more compelling than the main characters.

I don't mean to be too harsh because the book was remarkable in many ways for its vivid detail and nice plotting. I just wish that the main characters hadn't been such lifeless ciphers. There was enough reference in the book to the previous book that I am curious about that, and may go back and read it.

Charles Fleming clearly knows very little about Cuba,its culture, Havana landmarks or Cuba's recent history. For those who know Cuba well, his inaccuracies are irritants and distractions from what could otherwise be an interesting thriller. Do your research, Mr. Fleming, or set your story in Kiribati or such, in which case you would only risk offending a handful of people.