Our Man in Havana
Wormold's daughter had reached an expensive age - so he accepted a mysterious Englishman's offer of extra income. All he has to do is run agents, file reports, and spy. But his fake reports have an alarming tendency to come true.
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What Hacker News says
- Our Man in Havana is a very good book about the topic.
Secrets are a dark illiquid market where there’s high demand for things that don’t exist. So naturally there’s a lot of supply for that information. The fact that is almost all bogus is irrelevant.
- I’m no spy, but I believe your description of agents has always been true. Note that, outside fiction, “intelligence agent” is distinct from “intelligence officer.” The latter is a professional spy who recruits and handles the former from among regular people who might be leveraged, paid, or ideologically keen.
Only in popularizations are the two roles confused - though I suppose there are rare circumstances in which an officer goes undercover in order to directly pilfer secrets, as opposed to recruiting someone who can. Hard and rare one expects: language, culture and competent counter-intel have made recruiting someone already inside easier and wiser.
Also I don’t think competent professional spies have ever used “movie inspired” anything, but the generous interpretation of your comment assumes you meant the reverse.
But still a poor assumption to think the fiction ever got it right, starting with the confusion over what an “agent” is but including everything else.
Excepting Graham Greene’s “Our Man in Havana” and “The Quiet American,” which I suspect nailed the respective damnfool incompetence and arrogant ignorance of a certain type of mid-century patriot keenly. “Harlot’s Ghost,” though mystical, may also speak bizarro truth.
- I am a big fan of GG but some of his books I find just too dry, almost literally in some senses, where the arid African climate seems to just pour out of the pages onto you, and also permeates the contents ; The Heart of the Matter, A Burnt-Out Case, are examples that come to mind. Don't let your first impressions turn you off from this genius. Some of his other books are quite different. Had I started with one of these ^ I might not be able to recommend those ->
I have loved ; The Human Factor, The Captain and the Enemy, The Honorary Consul, Our man in Havana, The Tenth Man ...
- They can be quite difficult to get into, particularly for those who haven't had similar experiences, but I think they are worth the effort. They are also stylistically brilliant and contain some great character sketches so they are worth approaching from that angle too.
They will give you great insight into the sense of unease felt by functionaries in a dying empire who can sense the end, and react in various ways to this (disillusion, cynicism, outrage, despair). He's also big on doomed or failed relationships which never quite seem to end (in particular catholic marriages), and of course the books shed light on the relationship of a lapsed catholic to God, who pops up when you least expect him. As you may be able to tell from that summary, they are not often light reading, though he does spice the stories with little jokes. A sense of doom and unease just comes with his world view I think and you can never escape that in his novels.
Our man in Havana is quite fun without being too heavy, so that might be a good place to start. The Quiet American is also good and concerned with the end of another empire (the French colony in Vietnam), and the sharp end of the US intervention there.
- I went to Greene's old school (where his father had been headmaster).
It's interesting how much stuff from the school pops up in his novels - from the school motto in "Monsignor Quixote" to the route walked from the school in "The Captain and the Enemy".
Minor anecdote: He visited the school once, and I remember seeing him stop at a corner and turn to look directly at me. Only in retrospect do I realise that he may have been looking across the decades at me as he might have been himself (the architecture and uniform hadn't changed much).
If you're looking for a light read then I recommend "Our Man in Havana" as a taster of Greene. It's amusing and less imbued with the claustrophobia of his more serious novels.
- Just about any Graham Greene book: The Power and the Glory. The Quiet American, The Ministry of Fear, The Comedians, Our Man in Havana etc.
