Our Man in Havana

Published 1958

The plot set-up in this book could be for an opera. A poor salesman is raising his beautiful daughter alone. She has come to the attention of a violent, ambitious police captain. She doesn’t encourage him, but she doesn’t discourage him either. She has expensive tastes and Captain Segura could be of use to her. Milly has just turned 17, a nubile enough age at that time and place. Jim Wormold doesn’t know what to do. He can’t afford the things his daughter wants, but he certainly doesn’t want her marrying Captain Segura.

Yet this isn’t an opera, but a spy novel set in Havana in the late 1950s, during the moribund Batista dictatorship. Luckily, it’s spy novel buffa.

Wormold sells vacuum cleaners. Business is not good. He barely covers his expenses. One day he spots a smartly dressed young man in his shop browsing the vacuum cleaners and attachments. He doesn’t look like the type to buy a vacuum cleaner. And he’s not. He works for MI6 and he’s setting up a network of agents in the Caribbean and would Wormold be interested?

Wormold hesitates but then he does it for Milly.

Wormold’s primary task is to set up his own network of local agents. He doesn’t know how to do this, so he does the next best thing: he makes them all up. He writes reports from them and sends them to London by special courier, he collects money for their salaries, and books significant expenses, all carefully justified. London loves his work: the most interesting reports from the Caribbean. He clearly needs back-up, so they send him Beatrice, a beautiful secretary from the pool of beautiful secretaries that MI6 maintains in London.

Even under the doe-eyed and watchful surveillance of his secretary, Wormold is able to maintain the deception. That is, until the Soviets start killing his fictitious agents…

*

This book is the funniest of Graham Greene’s novels so far. While The Quiet American was a tragedy about the Cold War, this book is a circus and the secret agents are the clowns.

One of the defining characteristics of a Greene novel is the greater importance of the individual than any ideology or belief system. Indeed, he forces the messy needs and motives of characters into a death match with the belief systems they and those around them hold. Even when the belief system wins (as in The Power and the Glory), the reader knows that the triumph was a sham, that the all too imperfect human was the real center of the drama and that the drama ended the moment the human did.

In Our Man in Havana, the loves, aspirations, and mistakes of Wormold, Milly, Beatrice, and even Captain Segura are the point of the book. The spycraft and Cold War are merely the circumstances which they must navigate.