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The Actors…

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 1, 2016

Haiti is, by far, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. It is also the first country in the Latin America or the Caribbean to have gained independence, via a successful slave revolt. It flitted across the “world’s consciousness”… or, at least the media’s, due to the massive earthquake in 2010, which killed some 50,000 to 75,000 people. The rush of attention has faded, and it again has its status of “not a destination of choice.”

Graham Greene roamed the world, and proved to be a chronicler of what was once, and perhaps still is, called “The Third World,” though “developing” is more the preferred term, even if it is not merited. I’ve read a number of his works, for example, The Power and the Glory (Penguin Classics) set in Mexico, and The Heart of the Matter: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) set in West Africa. Three other of Greene’s works were set in countries that were ill-served by the interests of the American empire, and two of them were on the brink of transition. Since it affected me personally, I’ve read The Quiet American (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) three times, which was set in Vietnam. And I have recently read Our Man in Havana (Penguin Classics) which was set in Cuba, during the final days of the Batista regime, before Castro seized power. Thus, I figured a read of the third in this roughly grouped trilogy was long overdue. It was first published in 1966, after the other two works.

The three principle expatriate characters, Brown, Jones, and Smith, arrive in Haiti by boat, after making their initial acquaintances on the boat. Greene admits their names are unlikely, and there is no doubt that element of a spoof. They are very different characters, with wildly different motives for going to this non-destination. Brown is going to see his mother, after a long period of estrangement, and will, through the most improbable of circumstances, inherit a once grand hotel, that has fallen on hard times. Jones, who likes to be called “the Major,” due to his (suspected) wartime experience in Burma. When asked if he was in Wingate’s unit, he gently, and with experience, deflects the query with: “a unit like Wingate’s.” And Smith, who was a Presidential candidate against Harry Truman (for the Vegetarian Party!), along with his wife, are arriving to spread the message of vegetarianism to this country in which the vast majority of people are too poor to eat meat! And there are a couple of other expats, like the German wife of a South American ambassador with whom Brown is having an affair.

Looming in the background is the rule of Francois Duvalier (1907-1971), who is in a league of the most corrupt, venal, and brutal of rulers, who simply “run their country into the ground” economically. “Papa Doc,” which was the nickname for Duvalier, who was once a practicing physician of note, rules through terror, as enforced by the “Tontons Macoute,” his secret police. Anyone, simply anyone, particularly those who are close to him in the government, can simply “disappear.”

No question, Greene has tremendous insight into the human condition, and is a master storyteller. Once the stage is set, as indicated above, he develops with wonderful skill the interactions among the three former passengers on this “ship of fools,” as well as the other expats and their Haitian “hosts.” Each has their own back story that Greene reveals. In terms of simply “a story,” this novel, with several principle characters, could be Greene’s best. The novel’s title is a play on the French word for actors, “the comedians.” For each acts, and dissimulates, in their own way.

I find the novel faultless; the introduction by Paul Theroux, far less so. He give a summary of the novel, which I found annoying. And he reveals a distinct “blind spot,” relating the following without irony:

“National novelists are routinely banned by repressive regimes, but what other visiting writer has been personally denounced, and his book reviewed, by a head of state for making his country the landscape of a novel.” Later Thoreau says: “After Greene’s death it was revealed that for forty years in secret reports the FBI had monitored his movements and his provocative statements.”

So yes, “Papa Doc” did not like this novel, and decided to ban the novel and the author. But the US government did the same thing! As indicated, the FBI monitored him for 40 years, and he was banned from entering the United States on occasion. And although there fortunately remain major difference between Haiti and the United States, it remains unsettling that over the past half century the US is moving towards Papa Doc’s Haiti on at least two issues: the increased militarization of the police, and income inequality, where true economic development of the country, that benefits its citizens, remains on the “back burner.” 5-stars, plus, for Greene’s outstanding novel.

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Mindo'ermatter

Not One of Greene's Best Stories -- Ugh!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 12, 2020

A mixture of absurdism and nihilism, Greene's ambiguous relationship with life hits rock bottom with this 1966 novel set in dysfunctional Papa Doc's Haiti. None of the characters were likeable in this tragic comedy of depraved humanity caught in a cesspool of despair. Even Mr. Brown, the center of the story, is an antihero whose first name we never learn.

Perhaps the best part of the book is the tongue-in-cheek open letter before the first chapter from Greene to his former publisher, A. S. Frere. Here the author's protestations decry the novel's autobiographical similaities to Greene's own life, a veiled argument most likely proving just the opposite. Hence, the book's true intentions might be the self-defeating actions of the author's sense of failure and disappointment as he approached his senior years.

Mr. Brown (or just "Brown") tells his version of events, while suggesting he is an unbiased observer. Although the historical context of the story's setting and political context are based in fact, the book's title and open letter beginnings are possibly a code key to the author's otherwise futile and caucauphanous storytelling. Given that this book was published when Greene was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for Literature, it might be argued that this book was the author's willful intent to scuttle his chances to win.

The book is well written, highly descriptive, and emotionally troubling. Some might say it's rooted in fatalism. Hidden throughout the convoluted storyline, are some wise perspectives offered by Brown or his associates as cogent observations of lessons learned.

Consistent with other books by the author, his persistent struggles and ambivalence with his own chosen Catholic faith shape the story's lack of hope and futile tone. However, in this book, the protagonist seems to have given up.

Brown's account of his exploits and misadventures in Haiti expose his shallow and self-indulgent lifestyle as he deals with the full range of local criminals and corrupt governmental operatives.

I had hoped to find support by also buying Audible's standalone narration, but found it lacking in emotion and drama, only adding to the story's depressing nature and sullen experience. Ugh!

Having read it, even though I'm a strong Graham Greene fan, I do not plan to read it again. I admit to also watching the 1967 movie with Alec Guinness, Richard Burton, and Elizabeth Taylor, finding it even less satisfying than the book. However, without reading the book first to understand the internal thoughts and motives of character personalities, the movie alone in nearly unendurable.

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From the United States

The Actors…

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 1, 2016

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Guthrie McIllhennon

A Consistently Greene Novel

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 21, 2021

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In the interest of full disclosure, I am partial to Greene's novels. I think his writing is consistently good, and I've read at least ten of his novels. I never seem to tire of his typical protagonist: a solitary man facing some kind of existential fear. In this novel the protagonist is an (English, I think) businessman, a hotel owner, in Haiti who has just returned from America on an unsuccessful attempt to sell his hotel. The setting is Haiti, early sixties, I think, during a time of social unrest and government military oppression and overreach. The protag's fear is that his hotel will go bankrupt (no one is visiting Haiti during this time of unrest) and will be taken over by the government, or that he will be assassinated perhaps for not kowtowing to the dictator or perhaps merely for suspicion of aiding insurgents.

As in most of Greene's work that I am familiar with, there is intrigue. I love the way Greene's protags are always foreigners stuck in some third-rate politically dangerous place, yet they are usually on the outside of the intrigue, not essentially involved, but curious enough to either get slightly involved or appear to those involved that his is indeed involved, thereby endangering himself. People get killed in a very politically darwinistic way in this novel. Sometimes they are merely in the wrong place at the wrong time and sometimes they are completely innocent, and their deaths are completely unjustified and absurd. Greene seems to believe that such random absurdity is the way of the world. People die for the wrong reasons, and the evil ones, usually the killers, go free.

Much has been written about Greene's recurring themes of sacrifice and redemption. I will only point out that sometimes the sacrifice is absurd because those who die are not even aware they are suspects in an intrigue, and the redemption, therefore, exists only in the reader's mind if he or she feels the character's innocence alone is reason for redemption. In Greene's work the redemption is always ambiguous; I rather think he was pointing out the absurdity of the human condition and experience. Moreover, people have commented on Greene's oddball "yoking" of serious intrigue with comic touches. I don't have a problem with that as I understand Greene's novels to indicate all human endeavor, even so-called serious ones like international intrigue, are essentially absurd and comic.

For me, the pleasure of Greene's work is in understanding the mind of the aloof protagonist, the outsider, the observer, who is detached from the intrigue and, therefore, able to give the reader a satisfyingly objective view of the intrigue, the petty motivations of killers, and the paradoxically giant outcomes of their deeds on others' lives. There is also often a love triangle in Greene's novels, as there is in THE COMEDIANS (I read that Greene was a promiscuous man, who nonetheless stayed married to his wife, although they rarely saw each other after they split up early in the marriage). I suppose I could trace some parallel lines between the absurd sacrifice of life in Greene's novels with the innocent third leg of the love triangle who always gets "sacrificed," too. The style of Greene reminds me of the style of some of Camus' narrators, like, for example, the narrator in "The Stranger."

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dmiguer

All the World's a Stage

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 7, 2021

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"Come on, cheer up, let us all be comedians together. Take one of my cigars...my scotch is good. Perhaps even Papa Doc is a comedian." - The Ambassador, husband of Brown's mistress.

"Neither of us would ever die for love. We would grieve and separate and find another. We belonged to the world of comedy and not of tragedy." - Brown on his affair with the Ambassador's wife

Smith, Jones and Brown board a cargo ship from New York to Haiti. Brown is a British hotel owner in Port-au-Prince, the narrator and cynical observer of events. Smith is a former American presidential candidate traveling with his wife. They are vegetarian, pacifist, civil rights activists. Jones claims to have been a major in the British military. Brown warns the Smith's and Jones of death squads, the Tontons Macoute, that Papa Doc Duvalier uses to terrorize Haiti.

Home again in Haiti, Brown resumes relationships put on hold when he fled to New York. They include Martha, the wife of a South American diplomat. Brown's life story is told from an out of wedlock birth to inheritance of the hotel from his mother. The Smith's come to stay with Brown but Jones is detained by the police. Philipot, a fugitive cabinet member hiding in Brown's home turns up missing. The Smith's in their American naivete can't grasp the danger around them.

Jones is freed, now posing as an arms dealer to Papa Doc's bogeyman militia. A nephew of Philipot plots to overthrow the regime. Brown's bartender Joseph was crippled by the police and joins the insurrection. Jones weapon sales swindle is uncovered and Brown helps him escape to fight against the American backed junta. Magiot, a doctor involved in the revolution, reflects that while Catholics and communists had created great crimes at least they did not stand idly aside.

When Brown was a young boy he believed a Christian God was behind every tragedy. Near the end of life he came to believe a practical joker directed a comedy from above. The story takes place in the early 60's. Duvalier had consoliated power with US aid to fight communism, stealing most of the money. The setting was inspired by the Hotel Oloffson where Greene frequented in the 50's. Characters walk off the pages of Greene's own life, embodying both comedy and tragedy.

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Lewis F. Murphy

Casablanca Rick in Haiti

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 11, 2020

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This Graham Greene gem of a book should be more famous than it is. Its is one of his finest. Written in 1965 and set in Haiti about the same time this will probably be the definitive picture of that long lost time and place. People still traveled by ship - not floating Disneyland/hotels - that carried passengers and cargo overseas. People only had telephones and typewriters postcards and letters. Electricity was fitful. Despots had their secret police. America blindly cared for nothing but stopping Communism. The story is built largely around three men who met on the passage to Port au Prince and two women. One loved by her husband and the other loved by the two other men and maybe her Third World ambassador husband. The story can be read as farce or tragedy. I laughed several times when its seemed like a Monty Python type situation. Green's message is that horror is real but so much of it and what we do is comedic. How much of what we are is only acting the part? The protagonist Mr.. Brown born in Monaco, rootless, self absorbed, acts like the anti-hero in the Stranger or like Rick in Casablanca. Greene denied that Brown was himself despite his having lived in Haiti. But, there are asides. One about suicide that sounds very autobiographical if you know that Greene attempted suicide more than once while at school and another about the ridiculousness of young men as poets with failed first publications of poetry collections. Again, that happened to Greene. This is not a book that is bent on trying to develop in the reader a deep understanding about the characters. Instead, it smacks of how it is done in real life. We are not omniscient like an author. We form our impressions about the people we meet and deal with from the things they tell us, or what we see them do, or our intuitions about them, or our experiences with various stereotypes of the world. Indeed, Martha, Brown's love interest, at one point in their affair attacks him for treating her in his head and what we says to her as if she is like a character he is writing. This seems like an inner dialogue of Greene himself as he wrote this story. Greene apparently loathed America (and a lot about American)s but the most admirable character is the American. Its a droll book and yet truthful.

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Mindo'ermatter

Not One of Greene's Best Stories -- Ugh!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 12, 2020

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Ernest Ohlmeyer

An intriguing analysis of human psychology under a brutal dictatorship

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 1, 2021

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Let me say at the beginning that I definitely enjoyed this book. It is said by critics not to be among Graham Greene's very best (e.g., The Power and the Glory, The Quiet American, The End of the Affair, ...) but it is a well written and nicely plotted book. Some might place it between Greene's hard literary novels and his "entertainments." The setting is Haiti during the dictatorship of "Papa Doc" Duvalier and has as main characters an American missionary couple, the Smiths; a British adventurer, Mr Jones; and the narrator, Mr Brown, born in Monte Carlo, educated in Britain, and now the owner of a hotel in Port-au-Prince. I won't describe the details of the plot, but simply say that it is a harrowing description of life under the Haitian dictatorship. It's main themes examine the psychological evolution of Brown, Jones and the Smiths: the world-weariness and cynicism of the first, the conniving duplicity and eventual redemption of the second, and the idealistic zeal, eventually tempered by reality, of the last. The title refers to the inconsequential and ridiculous roles that humans often play during events moving outside their control and the fatalism this often engenders. A nice read and certainly recommended.

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JAK

Greene in Haiti

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 25, 2018

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I hadn't read a Graham Greene novel in many years and wondered if I could still read him.Well the answer is a definite yes.

The novel is set in Haiti during the Duvalier years.The exact time setting is a little murky but I think it's around 1964.(By the way some of the historical events mentioned don't properly add up).The narrator and main character is Brown who is one of those obviously intelligent, capable men who has reached his late 50's without much to show for it.He owns a hotel in Port au Prince which doesn't have much of a future, to put it mildly.On a ship from New York he meets the Smiths and Jones , who are also travelling to Haiti.Jones is a con man who plays his final hand in Haiti, heroically.The Smiths are American progressives and vegetarians of impecable charachter.The author and Brown both mock the Smiths and admire them.In both they are justified.The Smiths live in a an American progressivist dream land which at times renders them incapable of seeing what is right in front of them.However , they have grit and courage and can be counted on when the chips are down.They will do the right thing.As a consequence , Brown , an opportunist of the highest order,winds up admiring them immensely.

The novel is well plotted and the Haitian back drop gives color and life.Greenes political musings can be a little ridiculous.But I have to give him points for one scene that is definitely a bit of political commentary.Brown is in The Dominican Republic , maybe a 100 miles from the Haitian border.He's being interviewed by an American manager of a local company.Brown is talking about how things are in Haiti in a rather matter of fact matter. The interviewer has no idea what he is talking about and no interest.He concludes that Brown , who probably is qualified for the job, is a kook and maybe a communist.There is a lot of truth in that scene.

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Patrick V. Whelan

I learned a lot about Haiti under Papa Doc

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 29, 2021

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I liked the characters and their development with regard to the political situation in Haiti at that time. It stimulated a concern for what could happen in the U. S. considering our politics, the Republican Party's attempts to deny voting rights, and the continuation of the "Big Lie" and the abject ignorance in this country, particularly regarding vaccinations.

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Christopher Jonez

Another Fine Graham Greene Novel

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 17, 2022

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Greene once again has his poignant characters trying to make sense of their faith and their place in the cosmos while navigating the tumult of what was then known as the Third World.

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Ray Schrab

and I place it with The Quiet American as a favorite. Graham Greene did not shy away from speaking ...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 5, 2015

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I place The Comedians with The Quiet American as a favorite Graham Greene novel. Greene did not shy away from speaking truth to power through his writing, and this book is no exception. Although Greene had spent a substantial amount of time in Duvalier's Haiti (where the novel is set), he was no longer welcome after The Comedians was published, and he wisely did not return. The setting is one of the most horrific small country dictatorships of the 20th century, and it was right in what the U.S. likes to think of as 'our back yard'. While President Kennedy was reportedly disgusted by Papa Doc's regime, there were other powerful elements within the U.S. who supported him at various points in time.

In this novel Greene characterizes most people as 'Comedians'. This is because most are trying to fool us, and are not what they would like us to believe. Early indications are that most people are less than they appear. Later developments demonstrate that some are actually much more, often in ways they themselves did not realize until faced with disaster and rising to the occasion. Those unexpected heroes were drawn from the ranks of ordinary people. The high and the mighty remained fakers, takers, phonies, and sometimes much much worse. It would be nice if Greene would have nothing further to write about, were he still alive. Regrettably, the world is no more enlightened now than it was then. He would have an unfortunate abundance of material to draw from.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I will be reading this one again at some point.

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