The Comedians [Mass Market Paperback]

I first read "The Comedians" around thirty years ago and then again around twenty years ago. Remembering how much I enjoyed and admired the novel I have just finished re-reading it and have now sadly closed the book.

It is an extremely satisfying novel written by one of the finest novelists of the 20th century.

The three main characters are the men, Brown, Smith (with the feisty Mrs. Smith) and Jones who meet as strangers on board the cargo-ship "Medea" bound from New York to Haiti where their paths cross and re-cross.

Brown, the main character, is a rootless hotelier with a shady past and without faith or hope.

Smith is a one-time American Presidential Candidate on an evangelic crusade to establish a vegetarian centre.

Jones is a mystery at first, a liar certainly, a con man perhaps, who falls in and out with the regime but eventually finds some redemption.

Set in the era of Papa Doc Duvalier's misrule with his sinister Tonton Macoute secret police the novel captures the atmosphere of a nation failed by it's corrupt leaders with a people living in fear and oppression.

But this story is not about Haiti, it is about failed romance, disillusionment, cynicism but with some hope and redemption (but not for all).

The introduction by Paul Theroux is a spoiler - he unravels and lays bare the plot and it is his opinion that this is "not one of Greenes best" and a "tepid novel" - whatever that means. I strongly advise readers to read Theroux's introduction AFTER the book and make their own minds up.

I believe this to be one of Greenes finest novels that even thirty years on from our first meeting was immensely pleasurable to read and one I highly recommend.

I bought this after watching an old repeat of Alan Whicker's documentary on Haiti. Whicker's World - Vol. 1 [DVD] He asked Papa Doc (the dictator of Haiti) what he thought of Greene's book as it casts an "honest" on-the-ground eye on the Tontons Macoute (who were notorious for wearing their black impenetrable shades) and his answer was characteristically evasive. I read the book in a day, it's a cracking page-turner. Mr Brown comes back to Haiti to inherit his estranged mother's hotel. It turns out she wasn't the woman he thought she was, she'd worked with the French resistance for instance. As the book unfolds, the apparent "blows-with-the-wind" Mr Brown is blown away as he mixes himself up in intrigue, hiding suicides, his affair with the diplomat's wife. All this set to the backdrop of fear, road blocks, and every day violence.
We also meet Mrs Smith, who's husband ran for vegetarianism against Truman in the elections, and to reflect her puffed up self-elated position: "Mrs Smith was dressed in a kind of old colonial nightgown and her hair done up in metal rollers which gave her an oddly cubist air".
The book opens with the main characters on a boat heading to Haiti, the way Greene establishes the main protagonists is spot on, each is introduced to us simply through Mr Brown's opinion of each, all to the lolling of the boat as they slowly approach the Island. The tense expectation of Papa Doc's regime looms as the boat docks into harbour.
Lots of humour in the book too, as is typical of Greene: "He seemed to swing from wall to wall on ropes of laughter".
and something I can quite easily associate with (maybe too easily!):
"I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on a pavement"
Go read it

Where are the zombies when we need them? In voodoo belief they worked at night in the cemeteries. Now in the unspeakable acreage of death and devastation that is Haiti another buried survivor has miraculously been found more than two weeks after the earthquake. In the nature of the case there can't be many more such miracles, and the task of uncovering the dead is not the first priority, but it is still there waiting to be tackled and it looks as if it may need supernatural intervention. From a horrified onlooker far from the scene the only help is any money one can afford. If prayers do any good we can try those, but as a mark of respect for a people whose suffering is past comprehension, I suppose that most of us, apart from thanking any gods there may be for our own escape, can at least gain a little more understanding of how it was for Haitians before this new disaster struck. You might have thought that they had suffered enough by then, and probably no historical account can depict the thick spiritual darkness, felt over all the land, in the way Graham Greene does in this extraordinary novel.

Greene is both a great writer and a great novelist. His writing has an unmistakable tone of its own, clear, elegant and with his own individual sense of irony. Just as a story, The Comedians seems very original to me, (just read that description of the voodoo ritual), and the characterisation is memorable. The Tontons Macoute for example are unsurprisingly repulsive, but even their commander comes across as a real person and not as a puppet or caricature. Both the narrator (Brown) and the con-man Jones are slightly seedy, but watch Jones's exit and you may get a slight surprise when he shows something approaching nobility. The liberal vegetarian idealist couple the Smiths are touched in with beautiful tongue-in-cheek humour. The sea-captain (and his wife's photo), Brown's moody mistress and her cuckolded ambassador husband and sundry others are nicely drawn too. Easily the noblest member of the cast is the communist Dr Magiot, and he serves as a vehicle for some of the author's deeper musings. Looming behind them all like one of the dark gods of Dahomey is Papa Doc himself. He never comes out of his palace, and I felt that some kind of retrospective justice had been achieved in the midst of the earthquake's carnage when I saw the dome of that rather fine building slumped forward towards its lawn like the head of some victim of the Tontons Macoute.

The story actually begins in the inter-war years, and from the brief account we are given it seems that Haiti may have been at least a place where life was tolerable. What turned the rural family doctor Francois Duvalier into the monster he became is not explained, but the sinister atmosphere of his rule can be felt palpably on page after page. Is this a political novel? On balance I would say it is, but clearly not everyone agrees. Brown himself, the narrator, is not by temperament political although he can observe and assess the political scene with intelligence, as indeed he had better do if he wants to stay alive. It is the author's own mind that is political, and his dry comments on American policy towards Papa Doc's atrocities - token disapproval followed by tacit support that he obtained easily just by posing as anti-communist - make ironic and illuminating reading in light of some apologias one heard for the recent action in Iraq. The sub-plot of the Smiths is political too, and then there is Dr Magiot.

The book is political up to a point, but the political questions are only a subset of the deeper questions that plagued Greene throughout his life and that give his work so much of its special flavour. On the one hand he is cynical in the best kind of way, unable to take people at their face value although not hostile or uncharitable towards them. On the other he seems to crave faith - faith in `something', with a plan B for substituting faith in something else if he cannot sustain his earlier belief. I would guess his political views were leftish, but he is no ideologue, and his sympathy with Dr Magiot is personal rather than doctrinaire. It fascinates me how a mind of this kind could find so much to attract it in Catholicism, but that was clearly the way it was. He reminds me of Muriel Spark to that extent - they find so much to satirise and mock in their freely embraced faith that I wonder what was left of it after they were through with that.

It can't have been fun living under the incubus of Papa Doc, nor under that of his son and heir. Presumably it improved at least a little under Father Aristide and the others who followed, if only on the basis that there was no way it could get worse. And now it has got worse. Earthquakes are not acts of God except as a manner of speaking in legal documents. They occur through well understood geological processes, although our technology is not yet up to predicting them with precision. What did the people of Haiti do to deserve this? Obviously, nothing. Deserving does not come into the issue. Their infrastructure, if it could even be called that, was pitifully inadequate to cope, and I saw a report that practically the one building in Port-au-Prince that has stood intact is the American embassy. Before we criticise, we can only note that the well-meant aid efforts are not some miracle of efficiency either, and when the monstrous dictator was getting political support (Saddam, where are you now?) this did not stretch to making durable architecture more widely available than the US embassy. Judge not lest we be judged.