Moreover, people have commented on Greene's oddball 'yoking' of serious intrigue with comic touches. In Greene's work the redemption is always ambiguous I rather think he was pointing out the absurdity of the human condition and experience. I will only point out that sometimes the sacrifice is absurd because those who die are not even aware they are suspects in an intrigue, and the redemption, therefore, exists only in the reader's mind if he or she feels the character's innocence alone is reason for redemption. Much has been written about Greene's recurring themes of sacrifice and redemption.

People die for the wrong reasons, and the evil ones, usually the killers, go free. Greene seems to believe that such random absurdity is the way of the world. Sometimes they are merely in the wrong place at the wrong time and sometimes they are completely innocent, and their deaths are completely unjustified and absurd.

People get killed in a very politically darwinistic way in this novel. I love the way Greene's protags are always foreigners stuck in some third-rate politically dangerous place, yet they are usually on the outside of the intrigue, not essentially involved, but curious enough to either get slightly involved or appear to those involved that his is indeed involved, thereby endangering himself. The protag's fear is that his hotel will go bankrupt (no one is visiting Haiti during this time of unrest) and will be taken over by the government, or that he will be assassinated perhaps for not kowtowing to the dictator or perhaps merely for suspicion of aiding insurgents.Īs in most of Greene's work that I am familiar with, there is intrigue. The setting is Haiti, early sixties, I think, during a time of social unrest and government military oppression and overreach.

In this novel the protagonist is an (English, I think) businessman, a hotel owner, in Haiti who has just returned from America on an unsuccessful attempt to sell his hotel. I never seem to tire of his typical protagonist: a solitary man facing some kind of existential fear. I think his writing is consistently good, and I've read at least ten of his novels. In the interest of full disclosure, I am partial to Greene's novels.

The comedians by graham greene