Novel: Our Man in Havana

Overview
Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana is a darkly comic Cold War satire centered on James Wormold, an ordinary vacuum-cleaner salesman in 1950s Havana who is reluctantly recruited by British intelligence. Lacking any real material to send, Wormold fabricates reports, invents agents and draws up elaborate false maps to satisfy his handlers, setting off a chain of events that mix farce with grim consequences. The novel exposes the absurdities of espionage, the moral compromises of ordinary people, and the self-serving workings of bureaucracy.

Plot
Wormold, a widower raising his teenage daughter, accepts a modest fee from the British Secret Service to act as an informant. He begins by sending innocuous observations, but soon realizes that the Service expects regular, dramatic intelligence. To keep the money coming, he concocts a network of fictitious spies and phony intelligence, using models of vacuum-cleaner parts and imaginative sketches to fabricate secrets. His inventions include invented agents, bogus weapons installations and a false map of Havana that becomes inexplicably influential.
As Wormold's fabrications proliferate, they attract unwanted attention. The British bureaucracy treats his bogus reports as credible leads, prompting investigations and violent reactions from local forces and international players. The comedy of his initial deceit turns increasingly bleak when real people are endangered and killed as a result of decisions based on his fabrications. Wormold's attempts to control the situation only deepen the moral and practical complications, culminating in an exposure that forces him and the Service to confront the human cost of their actions.

Main Characters
James Wormold is an unremarkable, pragmatic man driven by the need to provide for his daughter and maintain a comfortable life. His gradual slide into deception is motivated less by ideology than by a desire to avoid conflict and secure financial ease. The British agents who handle him are distant and self-assured, often more invested in protecting their reputations and the mechanics of intelligence than in the truth or the welfare of those affected on the ground. Wormold's daughter, representing innocence and ordinary decency, underscores the personal stakes that compel him to act.

Themes and Tone
The novel blends satire and tragedy, using absurd situations to pry open darker questions about responsibility, truth and complicity. Espionage is portrayed as a theater of appearances, where reports and dossiers matter more than reality, and where institutions prefer convenient narratives to unsettling facts. Greene explores moral ambiguity: Wormold is neither hero nor villain, but a small man whose moral compromises reveal the systemic failures of both colonial and Cold War power structures. The tone skews from buoyant farce to sobering seriousness as consequences accumulate.

Style and Reception
Greene's prose is economical, witty and laced with irony, balancing slapstick elements with sharp moral observation. The novel was well received for its originality and its pointed critique of intelligence services during a period of global paranoia. Its mixture of comedy and grim undertones has made it one of Greene's most accessible yet incisive works. The book was adapted into a 1959 film directed by Carol Reed and starring Alec Guinness, which retained much of the novel's satirical spirit while emphasizing its comic aspects.