Review: The Comedians

The Comedians The Comedians by Graham Greene
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The story takes place in Haiti in the 60s during the brutal dictatorship of Duvalier. The story is centered around an aged white man, who returns to a devastated Haiti in desperate search for a place to call home. The book's main character and narrator, Mr. Brown, was born in Monaco and has lived more of less like a drifter and a fortune hunter. When he inherited a hotel in Haiti from his semi-estranged mother he finally had a place of his own for the first time. Duvalier's regime drove away tourism and his hotel languished. Nevertheless, with nowhere else to go he returns to the island and stubbornly tries to make a home of the hotel, and a family of his lover, who is the wife of a diplomat. On the boat there, he meets Major Jones, the Smiths, and some other characters, who are to comprise the cast of "the Comedians". The book is of course not a comedy, and it is very sparsely adorned with Greene's peculiar dry humor. The characters are comic in the way they go about the pursuits, that through the lens of distance and time, appear quixotic. The ideologic Smiths want to build a vegetarian center, in poverty ravaged Haiti. Major Jones wants to make a clandestine deal with the corrupt government. Political and social critique abounds in the book, but its central point appears to be the tragedy of our paths through life, haphazard and blind.

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