June 2023: Graham Greene's The Comedians
Elliot’s Reading June 2023: Graham Greene’s The Comedians
Maybe it was me, but out seems to me that Graham Greene’s mid-career novel, The Comedians (1966) - don’t expect a stand0up routine at the Copa gets off to a good start, with the comedy 3 men taking a boat trip, who knows why? This isn’t 1886 — across the gulf to Haiti, which at the time was ruled by the Tyrannical “Doc” Duvalier and his thugs in the Tontons Macoutes - not a place where most would go for a business venture. The narrator, one of the passengers, owns a nearly worthless hotel in Port au Prince and he’s headed to Haiti to possibly sell the place. The 3 travelers amusingly are named Smith, Jones, and Brown (the narrator0, which seems to anticipate a group of secret agents perhaps each planning a coup or a heist? Smith is the most innocent, a former uS presidential candidate for a fringe party whose single issue is vegetarianism (he lost - and is completely lost in Haiti. But when the plot begins to thicken, GG thins the broth with a long and boring romance between narrator Brown and the wife of an ambassador, and the novel from that point become a drag despite a few real bright spots from GG who is always a pro stylist - notably the escape at night in a rain-drench city to try to make it safely to the border of the DR where, allegedly, the US has better relationships - which is to say more control. The title is puzzling, at least to me, but GG is I think known for dashing off titles - and in fact sometimes for dashing off books. This one, originally, was classified as an “entertainment” rather than as a novel (I think so anyway), and that’s about right: despite opportunities to really examine colonialism and tyranny - Naipaul, e.g. - this steers the easier course toward light entertainment - nothing wrote with a writer’s working for his/her living, but let’s not overrate the middling work that stands up poorly against the more powerful (Power and Glory, End of Affair, et al.). Ton Macuse
