What to read if... you'd like a mojito in a sunny place for shady people

Not the one you might think

Let us flit to pre-revolutionary Havana in the late 20thc.

Wormald is a vacuum cleaner salesman: single parent (his wife left him for another man) to an adored and expensive (horse-mad) teenage daughter, Milly, who can - and does - twist him around her little finger; eking out a living - until the tap on the shoulder from British Intelligence comes in the form of the ambitious, but inexperienced (and not terribly astute) Hawthorne. Wormald, he believes, is just the man to be Our Man in Havana - and so does Wormald, when he discovers just how much SIS are prepared to cough up. The only snag is that Wormald - naturally retiring, and worn down by the petty vicissitudes of life - has neither access nor contacts which might provide the kind of intelligence required. On the other hand, he is the seller of the Atomic Pile, the Turbo (and the Midget Make-Easy), which inspires his stroke of genius…

In Our Man in Havana (the title deliberately old school tie-ish), Graham Greene exposes and epitomises Cold War manoeuvring as the ultimate decadent pointlessness of moral bankruptcy: self-reflexive, self-aggrandising and self-serving, (which is why, of course, Wormald is able to manipulate its players so successfully- until he can't); the resulting ontological striptease, postmodernism’s self-exposure (this is Greene, after all) as a form of empty posturing.

There's a kind of sulphurous energy, a dark, bitter-rinded humour impelling the novel to it's triumphantly sardonic and cynical conclusion (all too convincing). Less convincing, perhaps, in what could be described as an emphatic Fanfare for the Common Man, is the slight subsummation of Wormald’s character in the service of the overarching argument: it really isn't plausible - Christopher Hitchens has pointed this out in his Introduction to the Vintage edition - that Wormald, the devoted father, would passively watch Milly’s association with the sadistic Captain Segura (a one-man representative of everything that’s wrong with the incumbent regime; rumoured to own a cigarette case covered in human skin; happy to classify people as the “torturable” or the “untorturable”); let alone, calmly entertain Segura’s proposal of marriage; or - even at a safe distance in London - say “He wasn't such a bad chap.” Wormald may be the little man personified but he’s also a fighter, exemplified in the ease - and enjoyment - with which he realises his deception; twisting and turning until he becomes the man who looks at his hands and thinks “I have to discover how to kill a man.”

But Greene is only too convincing in his ebullient satire on the escalating enthusiasm of Wormald's paymasters for his “product” - the Air Ministry very worried, “‘[i]nterested, too, of course…the atomic research people…’”; the devastating moment when, just as the Chief excitedly declares that he believes “‘we may be on to something so big that the H-bomb will become a conventional weapon,’” Hawthorne is struck by the stunning realisation that he may have mucked up on an atomic scale, in terms of his career.

Greene has great fun with such multiple meanings, every exchange, encounter or scene bristling with possibilities. The wonderful description of Wormald's awareness of Milly returning home from school -

He could distinguish the approach of Milly like that of a police car from a long way off. Whistles instead of sirens warned him of her coming.

- which illustrates her beauty for us before we’ve even seen her face; but also hums with the undercurrent of sexual tension - and aggression - which Greene reveals as running through day-to-day life in Havana; (there's a splendid scene in a nightclub on Milly’s birthday, involving a soda siphon and Captain Segura being - briefly - put in his place by Beatrice, Wormald's new assistant from SIS).

Or Wormald's enjoyment in deliberately selecting a telling phrase from the 19thc author, Charles Lamb - “But I will draw the curtain and show the picture. Is it well done?” - for his encoding; a phrase that in itself is also both Greene and Wormald playing with us, and a multiplicity of meanings: it's a paraphrase of Olivia to Viola in Twelfth Night, as she reveals her veiled face, taken from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare - whose target audience is children. Oh, the commentary and meta-commentary, not to mention intertextuality! Wormald’s team of “ghosts” supporting his submissions; and his ghost-writing on their behalf - Greene is constantly reminding us that there's never just one story: multiplying, proliferating, riffling the sheets of paper in front of us - until he throws them all up in the air, at the end, in Beatrice's dazzling (reported) excoriation of those sitting in judgement on Wormald's espionage career, and the world they uphold (“The Bench of Bishops arguing about divorce and the House of Commons shouting Ya at each other across the floor”), damning the acronyms - running from TUC to NATO to USA and USSR (and, of course, implicitly, SIS) - that represent the supposed underpinning of that world; when, in reality, there's only one story:

There are many countries in our blood, aren't there, but only one person. Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?…[W]e don't believe you any more when you say you want peace and justice and freedom…You just want your careers…

This is a wider-ranging - although allied - assertion than E.M. Forster's famous declaration that if he had to choose between betraying a friend and betraying his country, he hoped he’d have the courage to choose in favour of his friend; and, to an extent, self-contradictory: “many countries in our blood…but only one person”? The novel has emphatically exemplified the opposite of the latter; even if one focuses on the development of a single character, Wormald.

This is glossed further in Beatrice's assertion that “A country is more a family than a Parliamentary system,” which again provokes conflicting responses: after all, families are not necessarily peaceful, loving or well-conducted (indeed, to give only one, literary, example, an entire sub-genre of the detective story has developed around the internecine warfare possible within families); moreover, it would be all to easy to extrapolate from this a political argument in favour of dictatorship. Yet, allowing for these caveats, there's still a kernel of, at the very least, anthropological truth: a reflection and recognition of how people behave, band together and ally themselves. It's also, perhaps, a defence of the particular over the general which, too often - as exemplified in the brisk comedy of Hawthorne and the Chief - can slip from facility and superficiality to fatuity. Wormald is the particular personified, somewhat battered by love - he loved his wife, he loves and wants to protect his daughter - he falls in love again: these small, personal loves, tributaries feeding into a sea of human existence, seeking a definition which Greene offers.

“Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not countries?”

Greene’s ultimate statement - and it surely isn't too much inference to see the influence of his Catholicism (although its expression isn't how we usually think of him as a writer) - seems to say that the greatest virtue, power, purpose, solution lies in love.

(This is a version of material that has previously appeared on Substack in a different form.

Quick update: WTRI will be taking a summer break during August; but will keep in touch - thought postcards might be fun…)