The Comedians

The Comedians by Graham Greene
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A group of travellers who meet on a ship sailing from New York to the Caribbean find their lives entwined long after they step ashore in Haiti, under the dictatorial rule of "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his dreaded secret police, the Tonton Macoute.

Brown, the narrator, is a hotelier, returning from an unsuccessful trip to New York attempting to sell the hotel, which he had inherited from his mother. Among his travelling companions are Mr and Mrs Smith, vegetarians hoping to establish a vegetarian centre in Haiti, and "Major" Jones, who turns out to be a con man. The Smiths stay at Brown's hotel, and make it their base for preaching the benefits of vegetarianism.

These expatriates are the comedians of the title, and at many points in the story I was reminded of Jean Genet's play The Balcony, where the setting is a brothel, and the clients are given an opportunity to act out their fantasies. So the comedians play their roles in a society in which everything seems unreal, like a stage set. Over it all hovers the spectral figure of Baron Samedi, the Voodoo lwa of the dead, who functioned (in real life as well as in the novel) as the evil genius of Papa Doc Duvalier.

Brown, who is having an affair with a diplomat's wife, wants to elope with her, but is trapped by, among other things, the corrupt bureaucracy of the authoritarian state, whose ministers tend to disappear when they fall out of favour, and whose bodies disappear even during their funerals.

Graham Greene manages to convey the atmosphere of an authoritarian state well, with the ruthless elimination of those perceived as enemies of the regime. Some of his descriptions of encounters with the Tonton Macoute reminded me of encounters with the South African Security Police 50-60 years ago. and actually contemporary with The Comedians. There are similarities between all authoritarian states, but there are also differences. One of the differences is ideology. Some totalitarian states have an official ideology, such as Communism in the USSR, Nazism in Hitler's Germany, Fascism in Mussolini's Italy. In South Africa the ideology was Apartheid, which grew out of Christian Nationalism. Apartheid didn't begin as an ideology. Under Dr Malan it was an election slogan and a principle to be opposed to that of the previous United Party government. Under J.G. Strijdom it was a policy. It only developed into a fully-fledged ideology under Verwoerd, after which the tendency was simply towards naked power.

In Haiti the progress toward naked power was more rapid and far-reaching, because the ideological roots were weaker. Papa Doc Duvalier doesn't make a personal appearance in The Comedians, but his ministers do, and what is most obvious about them in the book is the insecurity of their positions. They disappear, and their bodies are not found. The comedians of the title are the expatriate characters, but it could just as well be the whole society, the regime and its opponents.

And reading it now, when Donald Trump and his minions are doing a Papa Doc on the USA. makes the story more relevant. There is little ideology, other than a distorted vision of neoliberalism, And the model seems to be that of Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There: "the question is, which is to be master -- that's all." Like the apartheid regime, the Trump regime has the support of Christian Nationalists, but Christian Nationalism is not the ideology of the regime. Perhaps it is that Baron Samedi has migrated to the mainland, and is one of the few immigrants who is not in danger of deportation.
 
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The Power and the Glory

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the third time I have read The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene, which is set in Mexico in the 1930s, when the Roman Catholic Church was being persecuted by the revolutionary Mexican government. This story is about a priest on the run from the police, knowing that if he is caught he will face a firing squad. 

The previous time was nearly fifty years ago. Though I remembered the main plot outline, I had forgotten many details. This time I read it soon after reading two others by the same author, Stamboul Train, and The Quiet American, and I think this one is by far the best of his novels.

Perhaps because I was more familiar with it I noticed different things about it on the third reading. The first thing that struck me was the quality of the prose, which struck me as much better than the other two books, and also better than most other fiction I have read recently.

When I first read it at the age of 22 I was quite harsh in my judgement on the whisky priest protagonist. His last thoughts recorded in the book were an admission of failure.

He felt only an immense disappointment that he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him, at that moment, that it would have been quite easy to be a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage. He felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew that at the end there was only one thing that counted -- to be a saint.

Any my main thought when I finished reading the book was "What a pity that he missed it, that he didn't show a little self-restraint, a little courage.

But reading it when older, I see it differently. We can only ever come to God empty-handed. And God can use even our failures. Everything that we do that is worthwhile is the Holy Spirit's work, and all that isn't is our interference. 

Also, since becoming Orthodox I tend to see things a bit differently. In the Orthodox Church the Sunday after Pentecost is All Saints Day. Being a saint is the effect of the Holy Spirit in the life of a person. We also, soon after Pentecost, celebrate the fathers of the various Ecumenical Councils. It is the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost that makes these things possible. 

And for Orthodox Christians, the primary sign of the acquisition of the Holy Spirit is not, as it is for Pentecostals, speaking in tongues, but the acquisition of a merciful heart. And this is what struck me most on this third reading of this book -- that the whisky priest, whatever his failings, acknowledged those failings, and acquired a merciful heart.

So at this reading I came to a different conclusion: he didn't feel like a saint, and just for that reason he was one.






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The Quiet American

The Quiet American by Graham Greene
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I think this is one of Graham Greene's best books. I find Graham Greene a bit like Stephen Kind -- I like some of his books a lot, and others I don't like much at all. This is definitely one that I liked.

Thomas Fowler is a reporter for a British newspaper, reporting on the French colonial war in Vietnam when the Americans are just beginning to get involved. One of the new people at the American embassy, Pyle, tries to befriend Fowler, and falls in love with his girlfriend, Phuong, whom he steals, ever so politely. 

Fowler tries to be neutral in his reporting, and to remain uninvolved, but Pyle's role causes him to reexamine his approach, and but he is never sure whether his actions are due to Pyle's political role or his own jealousy. 

Perhaps one reason that the book appealed to me so much is that it reminded me of my time in Namibia in the early 1970s. Namibia was then in a colonial situation, under South African rule, as Vietnam had been under France 15 years earlier, and I was, like the protagonist in The Quiet American, a journalist. And something Greene wrote illuminated a difference that I was aware of, but fund difficult to describe.

In December 1971 there was a big strike of Ovambo contract workers in what was then known as South West Africa. One of the interesting differences in the approach to journalism came on the second day of the strike, Tuesday 14th December 1971. My friend David de Beer and I worked for the local Anglican Church, and I also worked on the local paper, and we were also stringers ("correspondents") for the Argus Africa News service, which supplied most of the South African evening newspapers. But the strike was big news, so some of the newspapers sent their own in-house reporters to cover it, and one of them was Alan Hardy of The Star of Johannesburg.

Pastor Maasdorp of the Lutheran Church had said that one of their evangelists had been arrested in the Ovambo compound, and that Pastor Haufiku was busy trying to bail him out. Alan Hardy immediately phoned Brigadier Brandt, the local police chief, who denied that there had been any arrests. Dave and I went out to see Pastor Haufiku to check up, and he confirmed it, and said he would take us to see the evangelist, Thomas Nalupi. And Thomas Nalupi showed us his admission of guilt receipt.

This ties up with an interesting passage in The Quiet American, where the protagonist, the journalist Thomas Fowler says:

It had been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action—even an opinion is a kind of action.

Alan Hardy was a reporter, Dave de Beer and I were correspondents. And that describes the difference between us. To confirm a report that there had been arrests, the reporter asked the chief of police. That would never have occurred to us correspondents. For us the convincing evidence was the admission of guilt receipt.

There was more, perhaps. Alan Hardy was a bit older than us, but not by much. But he belonged to a different generation. We belonged to the 1968 generation. It had been, for both Dave and me, our last year as full-time students, and that was the year of student power, which had been immediately preceded by the year of flower power. But both hippie flower power and student power shared a distrust of authority. I had even developed a theological rationale for it. One of the slogans was "Don't trust anyone over 30," and I had just passed my 30th birthday, though I thought the least trustworthy age was between 40 and 60, when people were at the most powerful stages of their careers and were most likely to be embedded in and thus wedded to the System.

Of course the trouble with us was that we seldom adhered to the "audi alteram partem" rule, but then neither did the establishment reporters. They put the point of view of the establishment, businessmen, employers, government officials, whereas we reported what we heard from the underside -- the strikers and ordinary workers and those who ministered to them. And Graham Greene in this book illustrated the difference very clearly. 

And perhaps even more clearly he showed the shallowness and folly of much American foreign policy. Pyle, the eponymous "quiet American", was a fan or a particular (fictional) foreign policy wonk called York Harding. And at one point Dave de Beer met just such an American foreign policy wonk by the name of George Kennan, who struck Dave as incredibly naive. Kennan talked as though all he had to do was press some magic button in the depths of the Pentagon and all Namibia's problems would be instantly solved. 

I have sometimes wondered since then whether George Kennan was playing some devious game, and trying to appear more naive than he actually was, but since reading Graham Greene's book I wonder if he wasn't the model for York Harding.

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