Customer Reviews

Our Man in Havana

5 star:		(45)
4 star:		(32)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This 1958 novel was a complete surprise to me. I'd read three books by this author before and found them dark and introspective. But "Our Man in Havana" is a satirical spoof and I found myself giggling throughout. It deals with a theme that Greene has revisited on many occasions - that of a spy in a foreign country. But this time, it's all in fun, although between the 220 pages of this slim volume, he manages to say a few important things about social class, the Catholic Church, and the absurdity of international relations.

The hero of the story is Jim Wormold, a divorced vacuum cleaner salesman from England in pre-Castro Cuba. His 17-year-old daughter is growing up fast and he finds he needs money. So when the British Secret Service recruits him, he invents a whole world of secret agents and intrigues just to keep the money flowing. He is even sent a secretary, which introduces a bit of romance to the outrageous plot. All of a sudden, the lies he has invented seem to be coming true and the plot thickens, moving along at a breakneck pace. I was totally involved, and found myself laughing out loud at times. What a delightful read! Highly recommended.

I went into OUR MAN IN HAVANA with very few expectations. I was under the vague impression that it was a thriller of sorts and I somehow knew that there had a been a film made out of it a number of decades back. So I was a bit surprised when I started reading the book and found out that it was a comedy. Surprised and delighted, because OUR MAN turned out to be one of the more understated and enjoyable satires that I've read in a good long time.

The book is a smart send up of a lot of the standard material one would have found in the noir films and books of the time (the novel was published in 1958, when the genre was starting to wear itself out). A British secret agent, looking to increase his community of contacts, has arranged for an ordinary vacuum cleaner salesman to file reports of any unusual activity in the area. The merchant, Mr. Wormold, reluctantly agrees to this arrangement for no reason other than the lure of extra money; he has a teenage daughter with very expensive tastes (to whit: men and horses). To keep himself employable, Wormold constructs a whole world of intrigue to write home about. The back-cover hints at one of the book's funnier gags, but all of Wormold's fictions (and especially the reaction they receive at the other end) are hilarious.

Despite the comic portions of the plot, the characters themselves are allowed to retain a certain dignity. The prose is also as lush as one would expect from a Graham Greene novel. One particular scene stood out as a wonderful piece of writing. Placing two main characters inside a dark, dingy saloon, Greene describes the other inhabitants as looking like paratroopers about to parachute out of an airplane. Their quick glances at the door and their hushed demeanor are all exquisitely described. I like comedies as much as the next guy, but it's rare to find one that is simply this literate and also so entertaining.

OUR MAN IN HAVANA is a relatively short novel; my copy clocks in at just two hundred twenty pages. It makes for a quick read, but not a throwaway one. It's smooth enough to be read as a straightforward thriller, if that's what you're in the mood for, as its comedy is more on the subtle than on the broad side. But, that said, the neat cuts of satire make this a hilarious and whimsical tale.

More successful than most of Greene's "entertainments," this comic spy tale set in pre-Castro Cuba concerns an insignificant little man-a vacuum cleaner salesman to be precise-who, against his better judgment, becomes MI6's "man in Havana." A longtime Havana resident, Englishman Jim Wormold is divorced, but the custodian of his beautiful, Catholic teenage daughter, Millie. One day he is approached by Hawthorne-a hilariously daft MI6 agent, whose speech is littered with upper crust slang-who shanghais him into becoming a spy. Although he is resistant to the whole notion, his best friend (a German named Hasselbacher), suggests he simply manufacture his sources and intelligence and take the ample money. Millie's expensive tastes and his own devotion to her result in his succumbing to this temptation, and he spends a few happy weeks inventing subagents and fake intelligence. For the first time in years he's doing something interesting, and no longer has money worries-in the funniest bit, he submits drawings of vacuum cleaner parts as sketches of a new Cuban weapons installation.

Of course, this being Greene, complications arise. He is sent reinforcements from the London office, and must scramble to keep them in the dark as to his deception. At the same time, his inventions seem to be taking on a life of their own as people start dying around him, and somebody seems to think he's a real spy. Integral to all this is the ever-present Captain Seguras, a policeman of some renown as a sadist who seeks Millie's hand in marriage. Although a deep melancholy and tragedy lurks in the background, and there's a rather lame love injected, it remains a delightfully absurd tale, one of Greene's better efforts. One is rather reminded of Joseph Conrad's classic, The Secret Agent, in which an ordinary shopkeeper receives payment as a spy for doing nothing-payments which allow him to keep the company of a beautiful woman-and whose misguided scheme ultimately crumbles around him.

This is perhaps the most enjoyable Graham Greene novel I have yet read. Greene dubs it one of his "Entertainments" and it certainly IS entertaining. I am a huge Ian Fleming fan and Greene covers some of the same territory here: British spies in exotic locales. In fact, both Fleming and Greene worked for the British Secret Service around the same time. However, whereas Fleming is sympathetic to the Secret Service, Greene is more severe.

The story concerns a vacuum-cleaner salesman in Cuba named Wormold. One day, he meets a very eccentric man from MI6 who wants Wormold to be Britain's man in Havana. Wormold takes the job in order to get money for his daughter. However, he is not very adept at being a spy, so he starts making up the reports...which suddenly begin to come true.

Greene portrays the British Secret Service as a bunch of fools who are ready to believe whatever Wormold tells them. It is a typical Greene story in that it deals with the moral ambiguities of life and it has an extremely flawed hero. This is one of the best spy novels I've ever read.

In this novel, set in Cuba in the days before Castro, Mr Greene is at his most ironic. He tells the tale of Jim Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman who lives quietly in Havana and worries about his devoutly Catholic teenage daughter whom he is raising as a single parent. He is unexpectedly recruited, in a public toilet, by the British Secret Service to "keep an eye on things" in Cuba. When no obvious "things" present themselves, Wormold decides to invent agents and situations to pad his reports. But then things start to go wrong and reality begins to mirror fiction.
Graham Greene captures the sleepy, sensual heat of the Caribbean perfectly. His characters are extraordinarily vividly painted and the book lurches wildly from comedy to tragedy to farce, damning the bureaucrats, the police and the sinister, grey men of the secret services along the way. With The Comedians and Brighton Rock this must surely rank as one of Mr Greene's best entertainments.

If you've got Scotch miniatures at home, you are bound to be reminded of this book pretty often.This is one of Greene's lightest, but best novels.Brilliantly crafted characters and a fabulous storyline make this a joy to read. The unworldy air of the events and a grand climax grips the Greene fan and the uninitiated alike.The conflict present in Greene's characters is present here as well -Wormold,the vacuum-cleaner seller cum spy struggles to keep his life in check and conscience within bounds. Greene himself was an MI-6 agent.Is he trying to put across something about MI-6 or the secret services in general?Apparently Greene once acknowledged this fact. A must-read.

I first read this book several years ago when it was titled "The Tailor Of Panama" and written by John le Carré. I finally realize why I enjoyed that earlier book so, in that le Carré modeled the work so directly (and with proper acknowledgement) on this 1958 masterpiece.

Le Carré's effort isn't bad, but its often-maudlin tone detracts from the humor of the situation. Not so Greene, who subtitled his book "An Entertainment" and meant it. He doesn't waive all suspense and tragic overtones in search of punchlines; one of the chief joys of this book is how well it works as a spy novel. But unlike heavier Greene works like "The Power And The Glory," "Our Man" plays in a kind of high-adventure, almost Ian Fleming kind of way.

Greene's novel concerns a struggling British vacuum salesman living in Cuba, Jim Wormold, recruited by U.K. espionage to provide intelligence on the local scene as it becomes a hot spot in East-West relations. Wormold can't resist their money, but decides that instead of giving honest information, he will make up stories with the "assistance" of a stable of recruited agents he invents on the spot.

"Just lie and keep your freedom," advises Wormold's best friend, an old German doctor with a mysterious background named Hasselbacher. "They don't deserve the truth...They have no money, except what they take from men like you and me."

So Wormold does exactly that, for the benefit of his blossoming daughter, the flower of his heart whose faith in him and God he seeks to preserve though he doesn't share either belief. The result is a tangle of tall tales about alcoholic pilots and Mata Hari (...) he basically makes up as he goes along.

At one point, he wonders whether he pushed his luck when he presents the plans for one of his vacuum cleaner models as a secret Soviet base, but he's hopelessly addicted to his fiction almost as much for the pleasure of creation as for the financial reward: "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 on a light and there they were, frozen in some characteristic action."

Wormold is playing a dangerous game; in addition to snookering his own country, he is also attracting the notice both of the rival camp and the Havana police in the intimidating person of Captain Segura, a rumored torturer who covets Wormold's daughter. But in oddly detached fashion, perhaps because his life lost much of its purpose when his wife left him years ago, Wormold improvises his way through with cosmic aplomb.

There is a deeper meaning to this book, based on Greene's belief that neither East nor West deserved any special allegiance during the Cold War. One character puts it this way: "They haven't left us much to believe, have they? Even disbelief. I can't believe in anything bigger than a home, or anything vaguer than a human being."

It's possible to take issue with Greene's value-neutral attitude, but his execution is so deft, and his style so entertaining, that you can't help but admire him. "Our Man In Havana" is a thoroughly mesmerizing comedy that manages to impart some subversive truths about where the moral lines exist between serving one's government and serving one's fellow man.

I read this book lying on a beach in Mallorca over the course of two days. It's an easy and amusing read. I liked the main character Wormold. He's so laid back and lets events overtake him and take control of his life. Not unlike a few real life characters I know! Anyone who can "fall" into the role of a secret service agent and then believe he can fool them with plans of vacuum cleaner instead of a weapon is clearly off his head. What makes the character funnier is that he thinks that he will get away with it and it is an earnest attempt to fool them that he is doing something meaningful. There is nothing sinister in his deception - just a naive desire to please and get by in life as quietly as possible. As you will find out in this book, the quiet life is something that he fails to achieve.

The only reason why it doesn't score 5 points is that it's a bit light weight. It's over all to soon. - Perfect for the beach though.

So, I picked up this book at a flea market in Obergnigl-a small suburb of Salzburg, Austria. The only reason that I bought it was because the inside cover told the reader that this book was forbidden to be brought into the United States of America or The British Empire. Well, naturally, who would not be incredibly intrigued after reading that lovely statement? I soon realized the reasons behind the hype over Graham Greene. After having read this book, the next day I went to the Rupertus Buchhandlung on Dreifaltigkeits Gasse in Salzburg and bought "The Third Man." (I read that in one day...) In short, what I am trying to say is that this man is one heck of a fabulous writer. He takes you to the far corners of the world--and throws everything at you.. it's like an assault on the senses. In this case, the main character, Wormwold, is a British vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana, Cuba--pre Castro. A British Intelligence agent offers Wormwold a job in the bathroom of one of the local bars as the British contact in Havanna. Wormwold decides to take the job to save money for his quickly maturing (and Omnipresent Catholic) daughter. Well, one thing leads to another, and the next thing you know, his best friend (Hasselbacher) is being exceedingly obvious about his connections to Germany, a dog is poisoned with drugs meant for Wormwold, the secretary turns into a love interest, strippers are being dragged into Cuban/British Issues, the police are busy playing draughts (checkers) with whiskey bottles, and imaginary agents become real and are being killed. Ok, so that's a Huge summarization---so read it, enjoy it, savour it. This book is only for the people that can really appreciate noir fiction/spy novels... oh, and you have to have a sense of humor too. I also HIGHLY recommend "The Third Man." It is, in my opinion, a better written novel than "Our Man in Havana." However, this book has its merits and should be read for pure leisure... Graham Greene is a winner and should be savoured as a writer of fantastic spy novels.

Wormold is a middle-aged expatriot British vacuum cleaner store owner/salesman living in Havana with his only daughter, Milly, 16 or 17 year old archtyical good but bad Catholic school girl cum leathal "Lolita" cum Cher from the movie "Clueless"--her favorite passtime is spending her father's money, sometimes on credit to Wormold's dismay. Feeling a general ennui about life after Milly's mother (his wife) leaves him to run off with another man, Wormold's whole life is indulging Milly, drinking with an ex-Nazi (possibly) drinking buddy Dr. Hasselbacher, and collecting miniature bourbon and whisky bottles (he has 100s).

When Milly wants a horse, Wormold decides to accept a manna from heaven in the form of a lucrative "part-time" job setting up the Havana station for the British secret service. Or was it a contract with the devil? As the heedless Wormold invents sub-agents and technical "drawings" for the "enemy's" (though which enemy we don't even know) secret installations in Havana, and generally fakes out the fools at Headquarters in London, real people start dying. What is going on? Can inventions--people and state secrets--of the imagination, "as if writing a novel" really come to life?

Tightly written with Greene's usual cast of colorful characters both local and expatriot, like the would be suitor of Milly, a policeman reknowned in Havana for carrying a human-skin cigarette case, Captain Seguras, this book is short, dense, compact, and worthwhile reading. It's a comical/satirical look at the human condition as well one of Graham's favorite topics, international intrigue and the world of the "spy."