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Tim O'Brien

611. Graham Greene - The Comedians


Took me a long time to read this (not long) book, but a lot of sport on TV and I struggled to get into it.

The characters all have banal English names (Smith, Brown, Jones) and all turn up on a boat in Haiti in (I think) the 1960’s when Pappa Doc and the scary Tonton Mahoutes (I am not sure I have got the spelling right here) ran it.

Greene wrote about poor ex colonial outposts as (I assume) he found them, and overwrote his own Catholicism to provide some sort of moral compass, although always failing as Catholics do.

The plot has some similarities to The Quiet American (3) in which the central character betrays another in consequence of sexual (and here misplaced) jealousy.

Quite good and worth re-reading.


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