The Quiet Englishman

OUR MAN IN HAVANA (247 pp.)--Graham Greene--Viking ($3.50).

The only thing a Graham Greene hero can be sure of is that, morally speaking, he will not get something for nothing. In such superb serious novels as The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter, sin leads the man up to the brink of damnation, but there the moral bargain is struck, and in exchange for inner pain and penance he gets at least a peek at the way to salvation. Greene likes to separate these serious novels from the lighter ones, which he calls "entertainments." In these (This Gun for Hire, The Ministry of Fear) the action does not so obviously develop under the eye of God and the sinners do not even know that they need a salvation, but they go through the moral wringer just the same, and pay in some way for every foray against human conscience.

In this latest Greene entertainment, the hero gets away with more than usual. He is Mr. Wormold, a middle-aged Englishman who has for years been the Havana representative of Phastkleaners, a vacuum-cleaner company. Just now he is pushing their new Atomic Pile Cleaner, and business is slow. Like many a Greene male, Wormold is physically unimpressive. He limps. His beautiful wife ran away with an American years before, leaving him with a beautiful daughter now 16. Without religious props himself, he is bringing up Milly as a strict Catholic just as he had promised her mother he would. He has almost no money. Nothing really matters to him except Milly's future.

And yet, as Author Greene sees it, he is just the kind of man the British Secret Service needs in Havana. The proposition is first put to him in the men's washroom at Sloppy Joe's bar. A worldly friend advises him to take the money and send in false reports. Wormold, who feels he could never be a real secret agent, accepts the advice: he hires imaginary agents, composes false reports, even sends in drawings of vacuum-cleaner parts as diagrams of a devilish weapon being developed in a rebel province of Cuba.

But evil, preaches Greene (as he did in his anti-U.S. novel, The Quiet American), can be caused by the relatively innocent. Wormold's phony reports touch off a vicious series of reprisals from sources never quite labeled. The enemy kill and hound real people whom they suspect as Wormold's agents. He is himself abused by Cuban police and nearly poisoned at a businessman's lunch. The deadly joke reaches back to London, where the big boys recognize their mistake but do not dare admit it. The end is heavily ironic.

The chill of lurking dread is no longer so chilly, the pace no longer so breathless as in Greene's earlier thrillers. He cannot resist slipping in a cruel, pointless caricature of a dumb U.S. businessman, or an unlikely scene in a top-secret conference, at which Wormold's secretary sprays the green baize with Greene bitterness. Such interludes damage the "entertainment," but they cannot really spoil the unique formula of suspense plus sin.

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