Our Man in Havana is one of his ‘entertainments’, though the humour is dark, and blacker still for its jarring context. Graham Greene files his books broadly into two categories: novels and entertainments. It seemed to come from the wrong place like toothpaste when the tube splits.” You might take the figure of Captain Segura seriously, but then you’ll get a line thrown in like this:
Wormold is a ridiculous figure on his own, but flanked by: Milly with her feigned religious zeal Dr Hasselbacher, a German friend with an unknown past who takes numerical superstition to a whole new level and Milly’s ‘boyfriend’, Captain Segura, otherwise known as the ‘Red Vulture’ for his reputation of torturing and interrogating, the dynamic becomes inscrutably ridiculous. Wormold is a vacuum cleaner salesman, tasked with selling machines with names like the ‘Atomic Pile’ at a time of heightened tensions over nuclear programs, and in a country that experiences regular and prolonged power outages.Īnother Englishman approaches Wormold early in the story and curiously employs him to participate in a bit of espionage, despite Wormold’s complete lack of remotely related experience, which leads to a deep and twisted comedy of errors. Still, Mr Hull’s book is a delicious companion to the tale Greene confected from the incompetence of spooks and an island in turmoil.Our Man in Havana centers on Wormold, an expatriate from England and single father of a slightly impish daughter, who herself is alternatively accompanied by an invisible duenna or setting fire to other children. It would be interesting to know what the novelist would make of that reverent appraisal. Mr Hull even sees Greene’s “clairvoyance” at work in the faulty evidence of weapons of mass destruction on which the invasion of Iraq was based in 2003. He makes a game case, but some readers might conclude that coincidence is a more apt judgment than prescience.
In “Our Man Down in Havana” Mr Hull argues that, as well as drawing on his secret-service experience to describe the bumbling nature of much intelligence work, Greene was eerily prophetic about the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which arose when reconnaissance flights proved that the Soviet Union was constructing missile sites on the island. In reality they have been adapted from diagrams of vacuum cleaners. His masterstroke is a report of strange goings-on in the mountains, which he backs up with what are supposedly aerial photographs of sinister constructions.
Learning that the more information he provides the greater his remuneration, he invents a network of agents and increasingly farcical intelligence, to the delight of his minders in London. The protagonist is James Wormold, a vacuum-cleaner salesman recruited by the British secret service. These half-baked efforts were worthy of his own comic novels, of which “Our Man in Havana”-published just months before the revolution-may be the best loved.
0 kommentar(er)
