Sometimes, just sometimes, I follow through on things.

So, after references to Haiti had come up in Martin Hewitt, Investigator (Arthur Morrison); Babel (Rebecca F. Kuang); and On Beauty (Zadie Smith), I really felt I needed to read something specifically about this country.

I came to this -- written by Graham Greene (1904-91), and published in 1966 -- via a Five Books recommendation.

I found it both chilling and moving. It's a snapshot of Haiti under Francois Duvalier, aka Papa Doc, who ruled by terror from 1957 until his death in 1971 (when he was succeeded by his son, who was overthrown in an uprising in 1986). In his dedication, Greene gives the usual assurances that his characters are all fictional (not totally true), and adds: "Poor Haiti itself and the character of Doctor Duvalier's rule are not invented, the latter not even blackened for dramatic effect. Impossible to deepen that night." And he lists some of the horrible events in the novel that were drawn straight from real life.



We begin the book knowing that one Jones is dead. There's a stone commemorating him "on the far side of the international road which he failed to cross in a country far from home". The narrator also tells us that he was a bit of a mystery: "I am not to this day absolutely sure of where, geographically speaking, Jones's home lay."

The narrator then comments: "There is a point of no return unremarked at the time in most lives." And he goes on to tell his story of what that point was for him, and for those, including Jones, on board a ship travelling to Haiti in the early 1960s.

Our narrator is Brown. He owns a hotel in Port-au-Prince, and he is having an affair with Martha, the wife of a diplomat. The story begins when he is sailing back to Haiti. When the rise of the first Duvalier brought in rule-by-violence, curfews, and the ever-present threat of interrogation, he left. But now he's returning, hoping the hotel and the mistress are still there, but not banking on either.

Even from the beginning, there's something lost and isolated about him. Speculating about Jones, he says, "Perhaps he's like me and he hasn't anywhere else to go... I suppose those of us who spend a large part of our lives in dissembling... begin to smell each other out." Much later, Brown says: "I remember loooking at him one night on the boat from America... and wondering, are you and I both comedians?"

And as we fill in Brown's back-story, we understand how much of a drifter he is. Born in 1906 in Monte Carlo to a British father (unknown) and a mother of uncertain nationality, he has lived in a number of places, and done a number of jobs, some of them more than a tad shady. There have been relationships, but his very first fleeting sexual encounter was "the only love-affair I have ever had which ended without pain or regret". He first goes to Haiti because his mother (who has somehow become the Comtesse de Lascot-Villiers) has contacted him from the hotel she now owns there (the one she will eventually bequeath to him). He has not seen her since 1934.

Port-au-Prince was a very different place in the early 1950s. Greene explains in his memoir, "My first two visits to Haiti in the fifties had been happy enough. That was the time of President Magloire, there was extreme poverty, but there were many tourists and some of the money they brought was allowed to trickle down the social scale."

So Brown's hotel does fairly well. We wonder about him even at that point, though. His mother dies suddenly, during that first visit: "'What part are you playing now?' Those were the last words she ever said to me, and I am not sure to this day what exactly she meant by them." He realizes, in turn, how remote she is to him. It seems she fought with the Resistance. Or did she? "I knew very little of her," he says, "but enough to recognize an accomplished comedian."

Anyway, having cleared out once, he's now returning. To a liaison that's as flimsy as ever, and to a hotel with hardly any guests, and a corpse in the swimming-pool...

But that's getting ahead of ourselves. On the ship Brown makes the acquaintance of the aforementioned Jones, who is shifty from the word go. He's a born fabricator, telling stories of his military exploits that no-one quite believes, and proving himself both a master of ambiguity and a card sharp. And Jones's Haitian career is tumultuous. Disembarking, he is immediately detained (an experience he faces as though it's not the first time it has happened to him). But he's soon bobbing back up again. Mixing with Papa Doc's circles, speculating, sweet-talking, profiteering... Until he too boldly tries to exploit them, and they're out for his blood.


Greene studied history at Oxford

The other key characters we meet on board ship are Mr and Mrs Smith. They're the ingenus abroad. Sincere, but naive. Mr Smith was a US Presidential Candidate in 1948, campaigning for the cause of vegetarianism and the elimination of acidity in the interests of non-violence ("we polled more than ten thousand votes," says his loyal and very feisty wife). He's well-meaning, and actually not as green as he's cabbage-looking, but his expectations of Haiti are based on little in the way of fact, and it's a rude awakening when real violence starts to occur around him, and massive corruption doesn't bother to conceal its nature.

Even then, though, Smith doesn't NOTICE things. Sarah Juliet Lauro, in a very thought-provoking article, points out what's going on: "In one of the most painful moments in the book, the reader is subjected to a bit of dramatic irony: Mr. Smith, glowing with self-satisfaction after giving a wad of cash to a legless beggar, fails to notice that he may just as well have painted the man with a bull’s-eye. As another begins to close in on this new prey, the imminent beating is obvious to the reader while Mr. Smith remains blissfully ignorant. This is also an apt parable for what many felt was happening to the aid pouring into Haiti from the US (not without strings attached) during the Duvalier regime: it never made it into the right hands." Eventually, the Smiths acknowledge they can accomplish nothing in Haiti, and go to the Dominican Republic next door.

The United States comes in for some more direct flak in the course of the novel. The courageous Dr Magiot, for example, predicts that relations with the Americans will soon be back on a solid footing, because -- that old saw -- "Papa Doc is a bulwark against Communism". And indeed the American ambassador soon returns... Magiot says he refuses to despair, but insists that "our problems won't be solved by the Marines... The job has to be done with our own hands."

Smith and Brown, in their different ways, try to ride the waves. Jones, however, DOES get his hands dirty. In fact, he gives his life for Haiti. But the way it comes about is through his own ridiculous bravado, and the jealousy of Brown... The book is called The Comedians, after all... When the regime's henchmen are out for vengeance, Brown first spirits Jones back to the Dutch ship (non-Haitian territory), and then to Martha's husband's embassy. But then the narrator starts to resent that Jones is so close to the woman he himself can see only in a furtive and clandestine fashion. And Brown deeply resents that people like this Jones: "For a man of such ambiguity, whom we all trusted so little, Jones had a knack of winning friendship." Martha says he's a good guest, and her son likes him, and he makes them laugh: "She couldn't," says Brown, "have chosen an explanation which worried me more."

Philipot, a young rebel, wants a piece of the "expertise" that Jones is always boasting of. Brown wants him out of the way. And Jones, ever ready to blow his own trumpet, walks straight into the trap set for him. Of course, he will go and help the insurgents, he says. Happy to. And there's a cold little aside here. When Martha laughs at a joke Jones makes, the narrator tells us: "I comforted myself that the days of laughter were numbered."

And they were. When the chips are down, and Jones is up in the mountains, he confesses to Brown that his military experience is all a story: "Old man, I've never been in a jungle in my life -- unless you count the Calcutta Zoo... [In Burma] I was at Imphal, in charge of entertaining the troops." Just like Brown, it turns out, his father was unknown. The two are even more alike than Brown realized.


Greene's first job was in Nottingham -- which he emphatically didn't like

Of course, the rebels' mission is a disaster, and they're routed. Jones, unable to continue on his flat feet, remains behind to die. Others are shot. Yet Philipot is absolutely not disillusioned. Having escaped over the border to the Dominican Republic, he tells Brown: "He was a wonderful man. With him we began to learn, but he didn't have enough time. The men loved him. He made them laugh."

So Brown ends up without Martha (she's off to Lima), and without a hotel (helped by Smith, he partners another shipboard acquaintance who turns out to have an undertaking business in Santo Domingo).

Was Greene thinking of Karl Marx's quote, I wonder? The one about history repeating itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? When Brown goes to Haiti the first time, he briefly re-encounters a mother he never really knew, she dies, her lover commits suicide, and Brown embarks on an affair and a business neither of which hold much promise. When he comes back the second time, his progress resembles a bad joke. While they're all still on the ship, the narrator notes that some things are too private to talk about, "and too serious, if one can describe as serious the confused comedy of our lives... Life was a comedy, not the tragedy for which I had been prepared, and it seemed to me that [those on the boat] were all... driven by an authoritative practical joker towards the extreme point of comedy."

Thinking about his relationship with Martha, Brown muses: "Neither of us would ever die for love. We would grieve and separate and find another. We belonged to the world of comedy and not of tragedy."

And many instances in the plot -- cleverly, because it's hard to do this with such a dark background -- are played for laughs. Trying to conceal the body in the swimming-pool from the observant eyes of the Smiths has all the hallmarks of farce. As does Jones's (literally) flat-footed career as a rebel leader. Or the Smiths' crusade for vegetarianism in a country where people can't afford to eat meat anyway.

***

I liked this book. I thought it was cleverly balanced between comedy and tragedy, and bluntly evocative of the pettiness of many of our motives. The central character, Brown, is eternally disappointing, but fascinating. The details of Haiti's trauma make you shudder, but are sketched in a way that avoids lurid shock tactics.

The only point I would take issue with is the ending, because it presents two devices that I dislike:

First there's the posthumously delivered letter from Dr Magiot, the worthy tone of which feels rather at odds with what has gone before. "Catholics and Communists have committed great crimes," he writes, "but at least they have not stood aside, like an established society, and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate." Then there's Brown's dream, in which Jones forgets his one comic line, and then remembers it's something about a good place.

I would have wished for a subtler ending. One that just left you with what happened, and with the idea that Jones DID something, whereas Brown and Smith didn't. Is a crazy, pointless something, carried out by a dilettante whose vanity is piqued by a jealous rival, better than nothing? Surely not... But then... Are the inert, like Brown, "the only ones truly committed -- committed to the whole world of evil and of good, to the wise and to the foolish, to the indifferent and to the mistaken"?

Just leaving us with those questions would have been more powerful, I feel, than hitting us over the head with the letter and the dream.

***

A couple more points:

-- The Oloffson in Port-au-Prince was the inspiration for Brown's hotel:



-- And Duvalier reacted savagely to the publication of The Comedians. He banned it (and Greene), and said in an interview with Le Matin, the paper he owned, that the book was badly written and of no value. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs went on to produce a glossy brochure maligning The Comedians, and describing its author as "a cretin, a stool pigeon, sadistic, unbalanced, perverted, a perfect ignoramus, lying to his heart's content, the shame of proud and noble England, a spy, a drug addict, and a torturer". Don't hang back now...

A good beginning, then. But next I need to read something written by a Haitian. Because, good as it is, The Comedians inevitably focuses mostly on white people. There are strong Haitian characters -- in particular Dr Magiot -- but front and centre is our almost childish narrator, and the way HIS life plays out against all this trauma. So, it's a strong novel, but something a bit more homegrown will be a good complement.