Month: January 2025

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Graham Greene is a desperately good writer. He can’t help but write well, even on an off day. Even when attempting a literary loop de loop that goes slightly wrong. And because he has that magic gift to turn even his stumbles into artistry, there is extra deliciousness in the very imperfections we observe.

So it is with Our Man in Havana. Having read other of Greene’s work, you start this one with a comfortable expectation that he will deliver scene and structure. He does not disappoint. Right away, we are plunged into pre-Castro Cuba, and become acquainted with a typical Greeneian underdog protagonist – an impoverished English vacuum cleaner salesman with a limp named Wormold, whose wife, we learn, has already left him for another man.

But as the plot accelerates, we realise this is not The Power and the Glory. Greene is giving us a rather comic tour of the brothels, bars and casinos. As Wormold becomes embroiled in a world of medium-stakes espionage, the novel veers close to farce.

It is here that he misses a step on the balance beam. Without revealing too much, a few of the plot elements fail to land on the fine line between comedy and hyperrealism that he so carefully treads for much of the story. There is also a missed opportunity late in the story to create a dramatic counterpoint around the death of one of the characters.

But for everything else this book achieves – laugh-out-loud comedy, incredible sense of place and masterfully crafted characters – Greene shows in Havana that he is, yet again, one of the 20th Century’s finest.



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Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero by Charles Sprawson


My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don’t read a lot of non-fiction. I find much of it to be clunky, badly organised and badly written. It favours substance over form, as if there were ever a trade-off between the two! Non-fiction tends to pay little attention to the beauty and flow of words and sentences or the cadence of ideas. Worst of all, it lacks kindness to the reader. As in, ‘if you want to know what happens, mate, you will be forced to suffer through my clunky prose’.
At first glance, Sprawson’s watery account of the literature and history of swimming and all things wet appears to be no exception. By page 100, you realise you have been thrown in at the deep end of a self-indulgent pool of random facts, written by a man whose sole purpose in authorship is to free his head of as much aquatic trivia as he can, so that he might go back to his preferred lake or river and have another dip. Sprawson doesn’t even attempt to adhere to his own loose chapter structure – to wit, a big chunk of the final chapter, which purports to tell us about the decade Japan dominated competitive swimming, veers off into an impossibly long tangent about the effeminate French writer André Gide’s favourite Gallic watering holes. The hook is that writer Yukio Mishima liked Gide’s work.
But beneath this eddied surface, Haunts of the Black Masseur has hidden depths. The very self-indulgence that defines his writing style, is mirrored in the book’s theme – the swimmer is submersed, alone, embraced by nature, without the lifeline that tethers us to bourgeois morality. The point is, he does not have to be coherent, sensible or clear. He is free. This is the Masseur’s common current; the love of swimming as subversive counterculture or escape, which binds Ancient Greece, the English classicists of the 18th and 19th Centuries, the German Romantics, the Americans and finally (if only briefly) the Japanese.
So if you are prepared to forgive Sprawson his contempt for good writing and allow yourself to be swept up in a riptide of delicious, random and sometimes surprising anecdotes, you may just reemerge from the experience refreshed.




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