The comical, true-life story behind “Our Man in Havana”

Our Man Down in Havana: The Story Behind Graham Greene’s Cold War Spy Novel. By Christopher Hull. Pegasus Books; 324 pages; $25.95. W.W. Norton; £19.99.

GRAHAM GREENE’S life was a gift to biographers. They—and the author himself—have amply chronicled his adventurous stints in exotic locations, his work as a secret agent, his love affairs and his Catholicism. Christopher Hull touches on all of these themes in his focused and entertaining account of the making of Greene’s novel of espionage, “Our Man in Havana”.

That book is set in Cuba, which Greene (pictured) first visited by accident in 1954, after he was deported from Puerto Rico. (He had unwisely revealed that, as a student prank, he was once a member of the Communist Party.) Greene disliked the authoritarian regime of Fulgencio Batista but enjoyed the climate and the seedy nightlife, returning frequently over the next dozen years.

Ever anti-American, Greene approved when Fidel Castro overthrew Batista, Washington’s client, in 1959; he admired Castro’s social reforms but rued the puritanical clampdown on Havana’s fleshpots. Rather than merely witnessing the communist takeover, he tried to assist it, using his clandestine contacts to lobby against the supply of weapons to Batista and help furnish Castro with British buses.

These half-baked efforts were worthy of his own comic novels, of which “Our Man in Havana”—published just months before the revolution—may be the best loved. The protagonist is James Wormold, a vacuum-cleaner salesman recruited by the British secret service. Learning that the more information he provides the greater his remuneration, he invents a network of agents and increasingly farcical intelligence, to the delight of his minders in London. His masterstroke is a report of strange goings-on in the mountains, which he backs up with what are supposedly aerial photographs of sinister constructions. In reality they have been adapted from diagrams of vacuum cleaners.

In “Our Man Down in Havana” Mr Hull argues that, as well as drawing on his secret-service experience to describe the bumbling nature of much intelligence work, Greene was eerily prophetic about the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which arose when reconnaissance flights proved that the Soviet Union was constructing missile sites on the island. He makes a game case, but some readers might conclude that coincidence is a more apt judgment than prescience. Mr Hull even sees Greene’s “clairvoyance” at work in the faulty evidence of weapons of mass destruction on which the invasion of Iraq was based in 2003.

It would be interesting to know what the novelist would make of that reverent appraisal. Still, Mr Hull’s book is a delicious companion to the tale Greene confected from the incompetence of spooks and an island in turmoil.