"Greeneland" is a place of seedy bars and strained loyalties, of moral dissolution and physical decay. But although Greene produced some unabashedly commercial works-he called them "entertainments," to distinguish them from his novels-even his escapist fiction is rooted in the gritty realities he encountered around the globe. Known for his espionage thrillers set in exotic locales, Graham Greene is the writer who launched a thousand travel journalists. * The novel was copyrighted in 1958 and published in 1959, thus the disparity in dates. Also, Jeremy Northam does a fine turn in the novel's audio version. The 1959 film version stars Alec Guiness, Burl Ives, and Maureen O'Hara.and Noel Coward as Hawthorne. But when his fake reports start coming true things suddenly get more complicated and Havana becomes a threatening place. In return all he has to do is file a few reports.
His adolescent daughter spends his money with a skill that amazes him, so when a mysterious Englishman offers him an extra income he's tempted.
Wormold is a vacuum cleaner salesman in a city of power outages. Conceived as one of Graham Greene’s “entertainments,” it tells of MI6’s man in Havana, Wormold, a former vacuum-cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent out of economic necessity. 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 is an espionage thriller, a penetrating character study, and a political satire that still resonates today. 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)
