'No serious writer of this century has more thoroughly invaded and shaped the public imagination than Graham Greene' - Time
'Our Man In Havana' is Greene's satirical tale of espionage and intrigue.
Jim Wormold is selling vacuum cleaners in Cuba before being enlisted by a fellow Brit named Hawthorne to spy on Cuba for England.
Wormold is out of his league in the world of cloak and dagger missions, sensitive information gathering, and covert operations. He is a middle-aged father of a 17 year-old beauty named Milly, his wife ran off with an American some years before.
Running a small vacuum cleaner business in Havana with an assistant named Lopez, the British Secret Service has completely misjudged who he is. Unwilling to disappoint them or to give up the $150 a month salary plus $150 a month expenses, he fabricates coded reports of military construction sites (drawn by tracing vacuum cleaner parts), expenses accounts, and lists of fictitious operatives and informants.
Things get really complicated when the home office in London is impressed with his efforts and sends him a secretary named Beatrice and a radio operator named Rudy....
About the Author
Evelyn Waugh singled out for praise the new coolly cinematic quality of his style, but he is now most known for a sort of atheistic Catholicism (George Orwell sneers that Greene thinks "there is something rather distingué in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only").
However, when the Vatican condemned The Power and the Glory and demanded revisions, Greene merely referred the Pope to his publisher.
Graham Greene was a prolific writer and many of his books have been made into films. To find out more about him, click on the link below:
http://greeneland.tripod.com/index.htm
Here's the opening scene from the 1959 British comedy noir starring Alec Guinness.
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