Our Man in Havana, by Graham Greene

An audio book, from the PC Library.

I know that I must have read this book before, many years ago, but I had forgotten most of it, and was enchanted by the plot as well as Greene's wonderful prose.

An essay by Peter Hulme.

James Wormold is a vacuum-cleaner dealer in Havana, single father of a teenage daughter. Business is not very good in pre-revolutionary Cuba (ca. 1958), so when Wormold is approached by an agent of British Secret Service with an offer of money to gather and transmit intelligence to London, he is persuaded to cooperate.

Wormold is a hopeless secret agent, and he knows it. Instead of actually recruiting sub-agents or doing any real spying, he creates a fantasy list of people and bogus information -- and he is very successful at it. London is thoroughly taken in.

There is just enough humor to relieve pathos, and just enough romance to make it a nicely understated love story.

Sweet Tooth, by Ian McEwan

Dedicated to Christopher Hitchens.

An e-book, from the PC Library.

copyright 2012

"My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) and almost forty years ago I was sent on a secret mission for the British Security Service. Within eighteen months of joining I was sacked, having disgraced myself and ruined my lover, though he certainly had a hand in his own undoing."

These are the first two sentences of the novel.

This took me less than two days to read. It was entertaining, and quite clever. My only criticism is that it might just be a bit too clever: I'm not sure that the "trick" of this work doesn't overshadow the rest of it.

But I don't regret reading it, and may try McEwan again, just to see what else he does, if he does indeed do anything else?