Our Man in Havana
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First published in 1958, Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana is a brilliantly comic espionage novel set in pre-revolutionary Cuba. James Wormold, a modest British vacuum-cleaner salesman in Havana, is recruited by the Secret Service and, lacking both intelligence and reliable informants, begins inventing agents and fabricating reports from the designs of vacuum-cleaner parts. What starts as an ingenious way to earn extra money soon spirals beyond his control, as imaginary threats acquire alarming consequences and the machinery of espionage proves dangerously willing to believe its own inventions.
Described by Greene as an “entertainment”, the novel combines farce and suspense with a sharp satire of bureaucracy, political paranoia and the absurdities of Cold War intelligence. Beneath its lightness lies a more unsettling question about the distance between official narratives and reality, and the human cost when institutions mistake fiction for truth. Written at the height of Cold War tensions and published on the eve of the Cuban Revolution, Our Man in Havana remains one of Greene’s most enduring comic novels, exposing the folly of power with a wit that is as incisive as it is playful.
From the book
“In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.”
— Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana
On Our Man in Havana
“The end, which takes place in London, is in keeping with the plot, which is ironic, fantastic, and, in Mr. Greene’s talented and contemptuous hands, plausible.”
— The New Yorker, 1958