It includes his many visits to a pleasure island that became a revolutionary island, turning his chance involvement into a political commitment. Twelve weeks after its publication, in January 1959, the Cuban Revolution triumphed, soon transforming a capitalist playground into a communist stronghold.Ĭombining biography, history, politics, and a measure of psychoanalysis, Our Man Down in Havana investigates the real story behind Greene’s fiction. Three years later, he returned in the midst of Castro’s guerrilla insurgency against a U.S.-backed dictator to begin writing his iconic novel Our Man in Havana. immigration authorities deported Graham Greene from Puerto Rico in 1954, the British author made an unplanned visit to Havana and the former MI6 officer had stumbled upon the ideal setting for a comic espionage story. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.Our Man Down in Havana The Story Behind Graham Greene's Cold War Spy Novel Christopher HullĮxploring the backstory that led to the writing of Graham Greene's beloved satirical spy novel, Our Man Down in Havana evokes this pivotal time and place in the author's life. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. In short, it presented intellectuals with a Greene novel that refused to behave the way that they believed a Greene novel should have behaved. The Third Man was notable partly because it enabled intellectuals to read an explicitly anti-popular message in a film that ‘mass’ audiences made one of the most popular British films of all time Greene’s Our Man in Havana, by contrast, prompted intellectual readers to reconsider the legitimacy of the auteurist sensibility that scholars had brought to bear on his work in the intervening years. For those intent on appreciating the story specifically as a Greene novel, many of the semantic elements from his earlier work reappeared in this 1958 novel: a seedy atmosphere (this time Batista’s Cuba), a protagonist with a checkered past and a seemingly dull future (here Jim Wormold, a British expatriate vacuum cleaner salesman), Catholicism (in the form of Wormold’s daughter Milly, raised a Catholic in accordance with his ex-wife’s wishes), and so forth.
The story deployed elements and processes associated with several genres, including the espionage thriller, the comedy of manners, and the romantic comedy.
Our Man in Havana, like all fiction, could be read by audiences in different circumstances in different ways, depending on the sort of expectations they brought to the text.
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