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Title: The Comedians by Graham Greene, Tim Pigott Smith, Tim Pigott-Smith ISBN: 0-7540-0726-X Publisher: Chivers Audio Books Pub. Date: December, 2001 Format: Audio Cassette Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $84.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.58 (12 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Three white men in insane, poor, unlucky Haiti
Comment: Graham Greene's "The Comedians" is not as well-known as "Our man in Havana" or "The quiet American", but it happened to be my first Greene novel. And I am very impressed, and happy to have started reading Greene. The Comedian is a mature, disconcerting, memorable novel.
The novel is set in Haiti, in the early years of the dictator Duvalier, known as Papa Doc (late 1950s or early 1960s). Papa Doc, come to power through elections but tightening his grip through terror, has unleashed his reign of violence, through his militia-like "Tontons Mocoute", named so after voodoo-myth bogeymen. A land that was poor and moderately corrupt but in many ways happy, is gradually sunk into its own unique brand of hell.
Greene treats us to his description of Haiti through the eyes of several White people, and the lead narrator Brown's black local friends. There is hopelessness and gloom hanging over every character, an apt reflection of the tragedy of Haiti herself.
The narrator is Mr. Brown, a former small-time con artist who happened to inherit a hotel in Port-au-Prince, and thinks of Haiti now as his home and future. We learn of his story as he tries to leave, fails psychologically, returns, is caught up in a destructive affair with the wife of a Latin American diplomat, and keeps getting involved in the violence and madness of Haiti, even though he tries to stay detached. The name of the novel comes from his fatalistic philosophy of life --- that we are all just actors in the perverse comedy of life. Brown's memories and actions form much of the book, and his portrait is excellently done.
In the end Brown has to flee Haiti, as his friends die and Papa Doc's power gets more secure with American support. Ahh, Washington support for murderous dictators. My country, too, has seen some of that, as has the majority of Third World nations. Bulwarks against dangerous socialist ideas, these dictators supposedly were, just like Papa Doc, and hence deserving of friendship.
The Smiths are progressive idealists from the American Midwest, saintly people quite out of touch with reality. The caricature is a bit overdone, but yes, people from the American Midwest can be like that :-) They come to Haiti with high hopes of establishing a "vegetarian" cultural center that would improve the quality of local life. Unable to deal with the corruption, they leave. In some ways their attempts and experiences are almost as tragic as the story of Haitians themselves.
Jones is a con-man who can make people laugh but cannot pull off his deceptions. In a perverse twist that makes him heroic, Jones dies fighting with the Haitian insurgents.
The Haitian characters are more impressive than the White ones, and this is a testament to the genius of Greenes's writing, his empathy for all humans shining through the subdued/ironic tone of his novels. Some of these characters are --
(1) Joseph, the bartender at Brown's hotel, who is crippled after being tortured by the Tontons Mocoute, who subscribes to the ignorant voodoo ideas of his people, who joins the uprising after being possessed by the voodoo warrior spirit. In the end he dies fighting.
(2) The doctor with socialistic leanings, enormously learned, first tolerated and finally killed by Papa Doc.
(3) Philippot the former minister who commits suicide in Brown's swimming pool, and his nephew, the poet who seeks solace and courage in his people's voodoo, and then leads a hopeless uprising.
(4) A Tonton Mocoute Captain, a character shown too closely, murderous and frightening.
Graham Greene doesn't try to shock with dramatized writing. The writing is simple and understated. Reality in the Third World just happens to be scarier and more shocking than any atmosphere conjured up by fancy writing.
A most impressive and memorable part of the book, for me, was the description of the voodoo ceremony. It's such a vivid, personal account, that I couldn't help feeling that the author must have witnessed something similar, first-hand.
The drums beat. The initiates have their arms burnt. The "ogoun" (ceremony-leader) rejects the sweet spirit of lovers, and calls for the spirit who watches over warriors. And he comes, taking possession over Joseph the cripple, who swings a machette running and pours alcohol down the throat of young Phillipot.
The story of voodoo is, of course, integral to any history of Haiti. Papa Doc used voodoo superstitions to consolidate his own power, but just as importantly, the resistance used voodoo ideas for inspiration. Later, Papa's son Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier was also a U.S.-backed dictator, but unlike his father showed clear preferences for mulatto & Catholic culture at the expense of black and Africanist culture. Voodoo at that point became more exclusively an inspiration for the people rather than the rulers.
An excellent novel, understated but emotionally exhausting, disturbing in its quiet description of brutal injustices.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Good Place and strange laughter
Comment: To call a novel about the most horribly repressive and violent period in Hatian history The Comedians is typical Graham Greene irony. The main characters, Jones (a Brit expatriate on the run from a never disclosed shady past), Smith (a vegetarian crusader who was once a splinter candidate for U.S. president), and Brown (a man of no real country who has inherited a run down hotel in Haiti from his absent mother) are all rootless failures playing at life who are brought together in Haiti during a time of terror and political chaos when the country was descending into a kind of primitive madness. Against their will and in ways they don't anticipate, they are each sucked into the vortex. How they respond highlights the questions that Greene is forever posing about faith, redemption, commitment and responsibility.
The dreams of each character, flimsy as they are, are doomed to fail in a land where utilities and civil order have broken down, where beggers predominate and order is maintained by the Tontons Macoute, the zombie figures in dark glasses who dispense Papa Doc's brutal 'justice' and leave the evidence of it lying beside the road. Smith, who with his wife, wants to start a vegetarian center in the Haitian capitol, flees the country when he realizes that he must resort to bribes for the simplest permissions and even then the promises are a sham. Jones, who tries to con the Hatian government into buying arms that he doesn't possess, is uncovered as a fraud and flees to a South American embassy for protection (the British don't want him - or want him too much). Brown, who wants only to be left alone to run his hotel and pursue a pointless affair, nevertheless finds himself acting time and again to help one or another of the other characters (including a number of Haitians), all the while trying to remain emotionally neutral and uninvolved. He fails, and his failure brings on the book's one clear success, a good end for Jones who escapes the embassy, with Brown's assistance, to join and train a small band of Haitian guerrillas in the hills. At the end, having found 'a good place', he dies a comic but heroic death. He did not, it seems, actually know anything about warfare, having served in the army only in the entertainment division. His lies finally catching up. But as one of the Haitian survivors says - he was good for the men - he made them laugh.
Rating: 4
Summary: A solid classic
Comment: This book didn't move me personally to the extent of The Power and the Glory or Brighton Rock, but it's one of Greene's richest, most dilineated and consistent narratives. The humor is top-notch, and the sense of underlying sadness is persistent; sometimes, both combine in one spectacular scene - near the end, the exhausted American altruist stands in front of a crowd of Hatian beggars, literally throwing the last of his money at them with no expression on his face. One weakness, though, is a factor which ruined a lot of his later work, his communist leanings. It's not that I object to them on principle, but I don't feel like he ever really developed a groundwork for the ideology; he just makes his bleeding-heart characters into heroes, treating it in a similiar way as his religious themes, but something as concrete as a social system has to be dealt with more concretely than religion. You can't expect someone to have faith in communism. In the end, though, the damage from this is minor; a greater problem is the weakness of several important characters, one of them the main love interest. The presence of many strong main characters does compensate for this, however. This isn't one of Greene's spy thrillers, but it still builds a nice amount of tension near the end, and occasional bursts of action keep it from getting too weighed down in the malaise which effects the characters so deeply.
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Title: Our Man in Havana: An Entertainment (Twentieth Century Classics) by Graham Greene ISBN: 0140184937 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: September, 1991 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Power and the Glory (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) by Graham Greene, John Updike ISBN: 0142437301 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 25 February, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Quiet American (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) by Graham Greene ISBN: 0140185003 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1991 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Heart of the Matter (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) by Graham Greene ISBN: 0140283323 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: October, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Mountains Beyond Mountains: Healing the World: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer by TRACY KIDDER ISBN: 0375506160 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 09 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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