Our Man in Havana

Literary fiction · Dark comedy · Satire

Print length: 228 pagesPenguin Books, 2007

Description

In Batista-era Havana, James Wormold struggles to sell vacuum cleaners and satisfy the expensive tastes of his teenage daughter. When British intelligence offers him badly needed money, he agrees to become an MI6 informant despite having nothing useful to report. Wormold invents a network of agents, builds stories from newspapers, and submits enlarged drawings of vacuum-cleaner parts as evidence of secret installations. London accepts every fabrication and, convinced that his operation is expanding, sends him a secretary and radio assistant. The deception stops feeling harmless when a real person shares an invented contact’s name and Wormold’s reports begin producing genuine danger. This black comedy exposes an intelligence bureaucracy so eager for alarming information that it turns one salesman’s improvisations into political reality.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Direct · Spare · Witty

Pace

Brisk

Tone

Dark · Humorous · Satirical · Suspenseful

Structure

Linear

Focus

Character · Ideas · Plot

Emotional intensity

3 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 2 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

FamilyKnowledge and truthMoralityPolitics and ideologyPower

About Graham Greene

Graham Greene was an English novelist, journalist, playwright, and critic who brought the pace and machinery of thrillers to questions of faith, guilt, political violence, and compromised loyalty. His prose is usually spare and direct, while his plots move through pursuit, secrecy, and betrayal. Greene called his thrillers “entertainments,” but the boundary between those books and his serious Catholic novels is porous. In The Power and the Glory, a fugitive priest’s flight through persecuted communities becomes an exacting study of unworthiness, duty, and grace. The Quiet American filters colonial conflict and rising American intervention through a British journalist whose personal entanglements sharpen his distrust of political abstraction. Greene could also turn espionage toward black comedy. Our Man in Havana builds its suspense from a vacuum-cleaner salesman’s invented intelligence network, then lets bureaucratic credulity make the fiction dangerous. His recurring figures are agents, believers, lovers, and informers forced to act without moral certainty, often where private weakness meets public crisis.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Penguin Books
Language: English
ISBN: 9780142438008

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