Our Man in Havana - post I

The country might be different and the characters new but Graham Greene still has an eye for detail and of course the Catholic Church makes an appearance. What makes this book more of a light hearted read is that the main character Joe Wormold a vacuum cleaner salesman is not only non-religious but much more likely to have a crack at living life in more of a way than poor Scobie did in Heart of the Matter.

Bullet points from pages 1 – 60

* Wormold is a man under pressure with a beautiful and shopaholic daughter, a business that is suffering and a love for a wife that left him to run off with an American and to top it all he is an Englishman coping with all of this in Havana

* Then things take a mysterious turn when an English visitor visits his vacuum cleaner shop and then approaches him later to become a secret service agent for the British secret service in Cuba

* Because his daughter has expensive habits, which include a horse and membership of the country club, he ends up0 taking the position as the agent on the island responsible for recruiting some sub agents and sending in reports to London

* He has no idea what he is doing but reveals what has happened to his friend a German doctor Hasselbacher who advises him just to start making things up which Wormold starts to do waiting anxiously to see if his report has been accepted by Hawthorne, his handler in London

More tomorrow…