Our Man in Havana, published in 1958 just months before Castro's coup, captures the earlier Cold War years in a Havana that was a pit of intrigue though the unanswerable questions of who is an agent and who isn't, and to what recognizable side does anyone belong make it comic and very dangerous at the same time. This is the story of an expat Brit in Havana, a vacuum cleaner salesman who has no real allegiance to politics of any stripe but who allows himself to be recruited to spy for the mother country since, as a single parent with a high maintenance teenage daughter, he's got bills to pay.

The one thing Jim Wormold rightly assesses is, no one knows what is really going on. The directions from the home office are so vague that it is easy enough to invent agents and reports and not get caught, even when the home office sends the lovely agent Beatrice to pose as his secretary. It does not take long, though, for his deceptions to be picked up as truth, which multiplies the absurd intrigues and pushes him into the sinister heart of a place where a local police captain who lusts after Wormold's daughter coolly delivers a scary appraisal of who belongs to the "torturable" and "untorturable" classes. The ending is very funny but there are some tragedies leading up to it, the collateral damage of operating in the vortex of the world's political and moral ambiguities. Our Man in Havana is a run up of sorts to Greene's later novel The Human Factor, in which nothing is funny at all but the same question is asked of both protagonists: what do you put first, family or country?

Paperback in good condition