What I Am Reading: Graham Greene

I had reached a bit of a lull in my reading list; so while I was refreshing it, I thought it would be a good time to catch up on some of Graham Greene’s “entertainments” (as he termed his thrillers). I went through a period of reading novels about South America and the Caribbean last year, and Greene’s Our Man in Havana made that list somehow. I was lukewarm on that novel, but decided to give him a second chance with the three of his novels that most caught my attention.

The Confidential Agent

After once being labeled a cynic, I disputed the categorization by replying, “cynics could never appreciate the Spanish Civil War the way I do.” This book isn’t explicitly about the Spanish Civil War, but was written while it was being fought; and the protagonist is clearly an operative of the Spanish republicans. He is sent on a mission to London to arrange a massive coal shipment that could ensure eventual victory. After the mission goes south, he is forced to go on the run, and turns his agenda to revenge, sabotage, and escape. This book was written in 1939 and I am not sure if it was before the end of the war itself, but this seems like a grim but fitting outcome. I am a sucker for a revenge story, and there are few more deserving of vengeance than the defeated side of the Spanish Civil War (fortunately, World War II provided some measure of closure on the grand scale, but not for Spain itself). Additionally, Greene gives the protagonist an interesting backstory as a medievalist, tying his contemporary struggles into semi-legends of antiquity (while also rejecting a claim that an item such as a historical manuscript has the same value as a human life). [Expanded Dec. 2019]

The Quiet American

This book serves several purposes for me. A famous story (to Americans, at least), it serves as a bookend to another book I read this year, Le Carre’s The Honourable Schoolboy. Both books were by British writers, both were outsider observations of American involvement in Vietnam (and Le Carre name-dropped Greene appropriately in his book). Schoolboy featured a British spy and an American journalist, and The Quiet American features an American spy and the British journalist who observes and eventually comes to oppose his activities.

The second function that this book serves is a minor connection to ongoing politics, as currently-popular Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg wrote his college thesis on the novel’s relations to American foreign policy. He apparently likes to quote a line from early in the novel, saying that “innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.” The “innocent” who is referred to is American agent Pyle, a young, inexperienced, and overeducated man. Later in the story, after Pyle has waded destructively into the Saigon political situation, the more experienced British journalist thinks, “What’s the good [in berating him]? He’ll always be innocent, and you can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.” Pyle innocently avoids confronting the destruction he has facilitated (by giving bombs to a warlord), leading to Fowler’s decision to take action against him.

I also found resonance in Pyle’s devotion to York Harding, an academic with little knowledge of the actual political situation in (then) French Indochina. Harding advocates the enabling of a “third force,” neither the Communists nor the colonialist French regime. Pyle identifies warlord General The as this force, not realizing that he is essentially a grubby warlord with no grand political strategy. This brings  me back to my own education on International Relations, which had a strong emphasis on theory. I don’t work in foreign policy, but I hope that people who do (from my friends to, possibly, Pete Buttigieg) recall that theories did not serve us well in Vietnam, and take their York Hardings with a grain of salt.

The Comedians

I feel that this novel, which I probably liked best of the three, is a knockoff of some of the Latin American “Dictator Novels” I read last summer. This story tells of the owner of a hotel in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, who meets a conman and a crusading activist on his voyage back to the island, and who embarks reluctantly on intrigues and adventures with both. Haiti in the mid-1960s was about halfway through Papa Doc Duvalier’s 14-year reign. Greene actually did travel to the island at the time, as recounted in a somewhat tasteless introduction that denies the Hatians any literary accomplishments of their own.

The book feels like an off-brand dictator novel mainly because this is a story of an outsider, told by an outsider; there are occasional dismissive attitudes toward the Hatians on display, and only one Hatian (Doctor Magiot) is given the opportunity to display nobility. It is also a knockoff because it is set in the center of the Francophone Caribbean, rather than being the tale of a Spanish-speaking caudillo. Interestingly, one of my favorites of the dictator novels I read last year was about the country at the other end of Hispaniola, set at almost the same time. The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa covered the overthrow of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1962. In both cases, tensions between the two countries are an important political element.

Brown, the rootless hotelier, must come to the aide of each of his two shipmates in turn: Smith, the former (minor party) Presidential candidate who is trying to establish a vegetarian center on the island, and Jones, a conman spinning about his fictional past in various commando outfits. Brown does his best to ensure that no harm comes to either, though he eventually comes to resent Jones’ encroachment on his romance with the wife of an ambassador (with an interesting choice made to have her as the descendent of a Nazi war criminal). They all must operate under the shaded gaze of the Tontons Macoute, Papa Doc’s secret police. The air of absurd decay and repression is ever-present, as Brown’s livelihood is shaped by the grimly-accepted absence of tourists and guests at his hotel. Other whites tell him that better times are ahead, but he isn’t so sure.

Eventually, Brown joins Greene’s other protagonists in mobilizing against an oppressive (and again American-backed) system, though he does not do so out of any great political conviction. In fact, his rootlessness as the child of a Monaco adventuress renders him unable to attach himself to any larger cause, and his last letter from the executed Hatian communist, Doctor Magiot, urges him to find some way to find faith in something. His rebellion and escape is motivated by a plan to get Jones away from his own mistress, and to call Jones’ bluff in terms of his alleged military prowess by linking him up with a pathetically small and unequipped guerilla group in the mountains. This, of course, does not go according to plan.

The Comedians was interesting for reflecting Greene’s own observations of Haiti at the time, which he experienced I think as a sort of disaster tourism. It also has strong Catholic themes, and the narrator’s Catholicism is frequently referenced as he struggles to find a path of action forward. I could identify these elements, but they did not have a major impact om me, since I lack that background. It was in the occasional glimpse of Hatian characters, and their reaction to the dictatorship that they lived under (and their interactions with the white characters who came from a much different world) that I looked forward to.

I was going to read two other Graham Greene books, but I didn’t want to burn myself out on him. I’ll save them for another time; my list was refreshed by the time of this post.