Our Man in Havana (Vintage Classics)

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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? Q14 Chairman: Did you speak Spanish? Did you have any other abilities that might have been useful there? There is a conglomeration of Russian, American, British spy emissaries and Cuban secret police spying on each other, intercepting intelligence and trying to outdo each other. Hidden among the folds of the absurdity is logic, authenticity, intuition and an endearing story of friendship and love. So: Wormold is a bad vacuum-cleaner salesman as spy. But he’s not quite a spy. And Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare is not really quite Shakespeare. The lust that Chief of Police Segura has for Millie is not quite love. The truths in Havana emerge out of shadows. We or they can’t always tell the real from the artificial. These twists and turns make their way into turns of phrase, told in the form of oxymoronic ironies and contradictions:

What do you mean prove? Of course I exist. I’ve got a first-class business in real estate: a wife and a couple of kids in Miami: I flew here this morning by Delta: I’m drinking this Scotch, aren’t I?” 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.

BBC – BBC Four Documentaries – Arena: Graham Greene". BBC News. 3 October 2004 . Retrieved 2 June 2010. This is the first of Graham Greene’s novels I’ve read that is classed as one of his “entertainments” – so I wasn’t at all sure what to expect. The style, tone and nature of ‘Our Man in Havana’ clearly has a very different feel to his more serious novels (‘Heart of the Matter’, ‘End of the Affair’ et al) and as such is quite distinct from that oeuvre. If I love or if I hate, let me love or hate as an individual," says Wormold, and the author himself has said, Our Man in Havana has a Mission plot (see Spy Novel Plots), though a rather unusual one, due to it being a comedy and the mission being subverted by Wormold – almost turning it into an On The Run plot as he tries to avoid exposure and assassination. The ‘Mission’ Plot

Very soon the little fraud by Wormold escalates in to something dangerous and people start dying. Betrayal, deception, subterfuge, greed, confusion, manipulation - the elements have so nicely used by the author. There is a scene -involving a certain man and his "lady" problems which was actually hilarious.Christopher Hawtree. "A Muse on the tides of history: Elisabeth Dennys". The Guardian, 10 February 1999. Retrieved 16 April 2011. My favorite moment in the story comes when Wormold, busily inventing actions for his fictitious sub-agents to get up to, muses on the creative process: 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.