* Greene's Our Man In Havana is a rollicking good read. But do some readers find just one little quibble with it - that it is somehow slight? Is that because there are two wildly different 'tones' in the book, tones which simply do not mix? Absurdist comedy (a nation's Security Service taken-in by a drawing of vacuum-cleaner parts) hard up next to the uncomfortably serious (a man wishing to execute another and fearful lest too much knowledge - the other is stricken with impotence whenever faced with a woman - make him 'too human' to execute). Comedy might take the serious and flip it into the ridiculous: but to make the two exist alongside each other in the same place? Still a great read though.
* And then you could read Graham Greene's Our Man In Havana simply for questions like this: 'What can be so private about a vacuum cleaner . . .?'
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