This is my review of The Comedians by Graham Greene.

This harsh revelation of the "violence, injustice and torture" imposed on Haiti by the thuggish "Tontons Macoute" supporters of the sinister "Papa Doc" during the 1960s forms the background to a novel that is a mixture of tense thriller, sad love affair, and reflection on the meaning of life provided through the portrayal of a variety of characters. Sadly, this impoverished island escaped from Papa Doc's control only to suffer the ravages of AIDS in the 1970s.

Returning to the rundown hotel in Haiti which he cannot sell, Brown has to deal with the body of a dead government minister in his swimming pool. This must be concealed from his only two guests, an idealistic but naive American couple, the Smiths, who are resolved to transform Haiti with an ill-timed project to promote vegetarianism. Can Brown maintain his clandestine "semi-detached" affair with Martha, whom he resents having to share with her spoilt and all-too observant young son, while Brown is unsettled by the suspicion that Martha's ambassador husband knows about the relationship but appears to accept it. What has brought Captain Jones to Haiti – a congenital liar beneath his blustering charm?

Although Greene himself did not regard "The Comedians" as one of his best works, and he admitted his experience of Haiti was superficial, this book hooked me from the first few pages with his gift for storytelling, constructing a plot in which every incident and character counts, creating a strong sense of place and devising scenes which are by turns poignant, philosophical, menacing, exciting or hilarious – hence the idea that we are all to some extent playing the part of comedians.

The narrator Brown may be cold, cynical and self-centred, but his role as an outsider gives him the detachment to observe and analyse the people and situations he encounters. He may be forgiven a little bitterness since he has never known his father's identity, and his flamboyant mother abandoned him as a small boy in a Catholic boarding school where the monks could be relied upon not to throw him out when she failed to pay the fees.

For the first time, I have understood some of the Catholic angst which pervades so many of Greene's novels. Near the end, Brown refers to "the never quiet conscience injected into me without my knowledge, when I was too young to know, by the fathers of the Visitation." Brown seems to be the vehicle for Greene's introspection. "The rootless…. we are the faithless. We admire the dedicated….the Mr. Smiths for their courage and integrity……we find ourselves the only ones truly committed to the whole world of evil and good, to the wise and the foolish, to the indifferent and the mistaken. We have chosen nothing except to go on living."

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5 Stars

This is my review of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon.

What would have happened if a long-forgotten proposal in 1940 to give the Jews a temporary homeland in Alaska had come to pass? How will the Americans deal with the prospect of having to absorb millions of Jews who have failed to emigrate in time when the "Reversion of Sitka" occurs after the agreed sixty years are up?

In what first appears to be a Chandler-type cynical detective thriller, but which twists at times into a Bashevis Singer evocation of the culture of the Jewish shtetl, or a soft-centred rom-com-soap of family life, Chabron sets free his vivid imagination to create in some detail the world of "the Frozen Chosen" in an incongruous ambiance of halibut factories, cherry pie and vast pine forests.

The stereotypical antihero Detective Landsman, driven to drink through grief over his lost child and estranged wife, is still sufficiently professional to care about the death of a drug addict in what looks like a "cold-blooded execution". His often unauthorised investigations lead him into the archaic world of a "black hat rebbe" or rabbi who bears close resemblance to a mafia boss. The rather thin plot meanders to the denouement with the reader in my case mostly hooked by the sparkling pyrotechnics of Chabron's original prose, although at times his bold verbal experiments fall flat, or fizzle out, so that I can understand why this book has divided opinion quite sharply.

Many readers have complained about the frequent Yiddish words peppering the text. Although I found that they add a flavour and music to the prose, and you can usually guess what they mean, it was informative but too distracting to keep looking them up, so I agree that there is a case for brief footnotes. Similarly, the many references to Jewish culture could have been explained in an appendix e.g. the Tzadik ha-Dor or Messiah expected once in every generation, or the fascinating "boundary maven" whose job it is to define with lines of string the "eruvs" or areas which enable orthodox Jews "to get round the Sabbath ban on carrying in a public place, and walk to shul with a couple of Alka-Seltzers in your pocket, and it isn't a sin".

This book is riddled with wry humour of questionable taste, and is often very funny and clever, but also poignant. It is perhaps too long, and self-indulgent in its lack of editing. The author sidetracks too much into minor scenes and descriptions, loses the plot in the sinister wilderness of the Pearl Strait but glosses so quickly over some of the main facts that I had to reread bits to check I hadn't missed something.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars

This is my review of Vile Bodies (Penguin Modern Classics) by Evelyn Waugh.

Does the classic which brought him fame and fortune show why Evelyn Waugh was described in his lifetime as the most important British writer of his day? Certainly, his style is very articulate and witty, although at times a little too silly and dated for modern tastes. This is a darker version of P.G. Wodehouse, with a failure driven to sudden suicide, and a young woman who implies sex by talking about the pain it gives her.

Readers will differ as to which passages they find the funniest. For me, apart from those I cannot give away, it was the exaggerated but telling description of the motor race to which the "hero" Adam and his friends are invited. "The real cars that become masters of men, those creations of metal who exist only for their own propulsion through space, for which the drivers clinging precariously at the steering wheel are as important as his stenographer to a stock-broker."

In the loosely structured plot which seems to be a staccato succession of incidents not necessarily "going anywhere" we are introduced to the "bright young things" of the 1920s. They are hedonistic, selfish, lacking in direction, engaged in a haze of party-going – "Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties…parties where one had to dress as somebody else…..tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and smoked crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London, and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity.. Those vile bodies."

But beneath all the frivolity there is the sad undercurrent that these young people reject the values of the older generation who sent their children to die in the First World War, but have nothing in which to believe instead. Since this book was published in 1929, Waugh is quite prescient in foreseeing the next world war which is the "Bright young things'" fate. As the Jesuit Father Rothschild observes – the author never having met a Jesuit at the time – "…there is a radical instability in our world order, and soon we shall all be walking into the jaws of destruction again, protesting our pacific intentions."

Waugh was quite critical of the book, one cannot know how sincerely. The more sombre nature of the second half and Adam's brittle relationship with Nina may reflect the fact that Waugh's first wife, "She-Evelyn", left him for a so-called friend whilst he was writing "Vile Bodies", a blow from which he found it hard to recover. It is interesting to speculate just how autobiographical some of his books were, with many of the characters modelled on people he knew.

What troubles me a little about "Vile Bodies" is not being sure just how ironical Waugh intended to be. He was himself a heavy drinker, a socialite and a snob who looked down on "the masses". Perhaps he was a creature of his times, but one cannot help feeling that he was a clever man who, as in this case, frittered his talent on fairly lightweight themes.

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4 Stars