The Comedians

Graham Greene did not feel this was his favorite work, and according to Paul Theroux, it's not his best. [Read Theroux's introduction, which should have been called the Afterword, AFTER reading the book.] Yet this novel captures a historic time and the fate of a "failed state" under the spell of a mad dictator, Papa Doc Duvalier, whose obsessions with Voodoo and power engender perpetual terror and ruin, enforced by his personal goon squad, the sunglass-clad Toutons Macoute. Greene brilliantly divides the world into "comedians" and those who actually do something. We meet a rich mix of both, beginning with Brown, Smith, and Jones, the comics, on a Dutch ship with a Greek name, the Medea, in Greek mythology an enchantress who repeatedly resorted to murder to gain her ends, like Papa Doc and others in this enchanting book. Greene weaves a tight narrative, for the most part, where dialog comes at you in staccato fashion, revealing the soft spots, lies, and bluffs of each speaker. Brown, Greene's persona, narrates the book and shows himself to be a brooding egotist dwelling on his lost father and falsely promising youth at the Jesuit College of the Visitation at Monte Carlo, where his mother had abandoned him. He's the jealous, possessive sort, a lapsed Catholic who has replaced his faith with unattainable romance. His lover, Martha, the wife of a South American diplomat, is always in his thoughts, even though he attempts to keep her out. He dwells on her every word. Greene gives their secret affair a real feel of desperation and passion, mixed with distrust and futility. We also meet Mr. and Mrs. Smith, naive American do gooders who absurdly want to open a vegetarian center in the midst of Haiti's nightmarish capital. Then there's Jones, a grifter who is the victim of his own comic farce. The "doers" are Dr. Magiot, a closet communist who sincerely tries to save lives in the name of humanity, and Philipot, who starts off as a poet and ends up in the mountains with a ragged band of rebels trying to overthrow the beast. Greene also shows us in a sweeping gesture the disastrous policy of the US in Latin America, as President Johnson, in an attempt to keep communism out of the region, backed the lunatic Duvalier with troops, to the utter dismay of his victims. Greene was long onto America's mischief and meddling here and elsewhere, to the point where the FBI, for 40 years, had monitored his statements and his movements, according to Theroux. In this sense, this novel is relevant to today's naive global comic and tragic American policies of ridiculously attempting to "democratize" the world, while moving American corporations into these so-called liberated nations. Greene would have very much howled about Bush's "faith-based" missteps across the globe, and he would have found plenty of failed states and shady comic and tragic characters to write about. Above all, here is a novel that "counts." Because it exists, Duvalier's Haiti is preserved in its h

The novel opens on a cruise ship steaming toward Haiti. We meet a diverse group of characters who are revealed through the device of setting them in a game of cards on board ship.Brown, the primary character and narrator is returning to Haiti to reclaim a hotel he inherited and through his eyes we see the political changes occurring in the country and are made aware of the ominous threat of the Tonton Macoute secret police that hangs over the entire story adding dramatic tension.Jones , his fellow passenger is revealed to be a con-man who gets by on his ability to make others laugh (one of the comedians) . Smith a failed presidential candidate from the US is naively seeking to establish a vegetarian center in Haiti seemingly oblivious to the turmoil all around him.Brown's romance with the wife of a diplomat provides a subplot that mirrors the theme that everyone is deceiving someone. The comedians all prove to be actors playing on a stage filled with political violence and the everpresent threat of more to come.This was a very engaging novel and if not Greene's most well known book it may be one of his best. I enjoyed it and highly recommend it for it's memorable characters and stunning evocation of a country approaching chaos.

Graham Greene's forte lay in writing novels (and "entertainments") of political intrigue. I do not know if this master British novelist visited any or all of the countries about which he wrote. Mr. Greene seemed to have considerable knowledge of both the current and near recent political and societal conditions of the countries that formed the backdrop of his books. For example, in _The Comedians_ Mr. Greene shows an unusual grasp of the extreme poverty and deprivation suffered by Haitian people living under Papa Doc Duvalier's corrupt, dictatorial, and totalitarian regime as well as the extreme human rights violations and abuses of Papa Doc's sadistic secret police, the Tontons Macoute. Several characters in the book note with some irony vis-a-vis American foreign policy, that as bad as Papa Doc seems, he is at least a strong anti-Communist.Graham Greene does something very unusual with his major caucasian characters: he gives them very common, non-descript surnames. The reader never learns their first names. The narrator of the novel, an Englishman, is merely called "Mr. Brown." He runs a financially deteriorating hotel in Haiti that he inherits from his mother. Like the author, Mr. Brown is a fallen-away Catholic. A British soldier of fortune and con artist who comes to Haiti is simply called Major Jones or just "Mr. Jones." His talents consist mainly in charming women and in telling funny jokes. An American couple, named Mr. and Mrs. Smith, come to Haiti hopefully to set up a vegetarian center. Mr. Smith ran in the 1948 U.S. presidential election on the Vegetarian Line. He is derisively referred to as "the Presidential Candidate" throughout the novel and utilizes this sobriquet as a method of influencing the Duvalier government to approve of his scheme. Graham Greene refers to all of these individuals as "comedians" because they symbolically wear actors' masks to hide their true natures and to invent persona to deceive people. Alternately, Marcel, Mr. Brown's late mother's black lover who avers that he would have died for her "...was no comedian after all. Death is a proof of sincerity."Greene chooses to present these "comedians" as realistic, flawed human beings. They live on the fringes of life, never participating in the human adventure. But even comedians often have untapped hidden strengths that may be revealed in a crisis. Jones, the Smiths, and Brown eventually prove to be more heroic than they appear on the surface._The Comedians_ is one of the very best and one of the most heroic novels in Graham Greene's repertoire, and is most highly recommended.

For those of us who have spent a lifetime reading the works of Graham Greene (which we can do because he spent an even longer lifetime producing brilliant work), of this we are certain: Graham Greene is the greatest writer in the English language maybe of the entire Twentieth Century. His body of work is staggering, and "The Comedians" is right up there with the best of them. Expertly weaving the dread and menace of Haiti under Papa Doc with the intimate, personal lives of a classic collection of displaced European and American characters, Greene does what he always does: he makes the personal political, and vice versa. "The Comedians" is sublime.

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.