Our Man in Havana – Graham Greene. Cover by Derek Birdsall, 1975.

Graham Greene divided his books into “serious fiction” and “entertainments”. Our Man in Havana is one of the entertainments, and is probably the funniest.

Greene served with MI6 during the Second World War and worked in the department dealing with the Iberian Peninsula. One of the German’s agents in Portugal, “Garbo”, was a double agent who pretended to control a ring of agents all over England. To support his story he invented troop movements and operations from maps and standard military references. It seems that Garbo became the inspiration for Greene’s protagonist, the reluctant secret agent James Wormold.

The novel was published before the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 but aspects of the plot anticipate the crisis in which the US and the Soviet Union came alarmingly close to nuclear war.

I visited Cuba in 2007 with my eldest son who was then 17. Will was keen to see the Bay of Pigs, scene of the failed invasion of  Cuba by a CIA-sponsored paramilitary group, and to smoke the largest cigar he could get his hands on. Our plan was to travel independently, avoiding the big, “all-in” resorts. We wanted to use the network of cases particulates,  rooms in private homes that the government had recently allowed Cubans to rent to tourists.

Cuban Bliss

Raised on stories from the Cold War we both believed that most of what characterized Cuba in the first decade of the 21^st century – crumbling buildings, old American cars, food shortages – was  the result of the US trade embargo that followed the 1962 Crisis. We were unaware that much of what we would experience – including the casas particulares – stemmed from a much more recent event in world history. The dissolution of the Soviet Union led to the período especial, the economic crisis that followed the withdrawal of Soviet  subsidies. We didn’t realise how bad the  resultant hardship had been until we met the Cuban people who welcomed us into their homes.

Although most ordinary Cubans avoided starvation, persistent hunger was a daily experience. People ate anything they could find.  Someone told us that many of the animals in the Havana zoo “disappeared” and domestic cats became sources of protein rather than affection. A taxi driver enquired how old Will was. He had a daughter the same age “but”, he asked me, “how could we bring any more children into the world when there was no food to give them?”

Malnutrition caused epidemics, but it had positive effects too. The período especial radically transformed the Cuban economy and led to the introduction of sustainable agriculture,  less reliance on motor transport and the strengthening of the National Health System; Cuba’s average life expectancy is now close to that of the US.

However, in 2007, Will and I discovered that it was still much easier to buy an expensive cigar than fresh vegetables in Havana’s markets.

Anthony Burgess, 1962.  Cover by David Pelham, 1968

 A Clockwork Orange is by some way Anthony Burgess’s best-known work. It was first published in 1962 and became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic following the release of Stanley Kubrick’s film in 1971.

The novel received a positive critical response but Burgess repeatedly tried to distance himself from it. He claimed it was an unimportant book which he had written in just three weeks. This was probably because its bestseller status overshadowed his other – and better – writing; and partly because he didn’t like Kubrick’s claim on his work. The film was rated “X” in both the UK and the US and was criticized for its graphic violence. As a result both the film and the book were boycotted in the US. Two years after its release, Kubrick took the film out of circulation in Britain following accusations that it inspired copycat rapes and other violent acts.

A Clockwork Orange is set in a future English society with a culture of extreme youth violence. Burgess claimed that his inspiration was the beating inflicted on his wife by a gang of drunken American servicemen stationed in England during World War II. The book’s 15-year-old protagonist Alex narrates his violent exploits and the authorities’ attempts to reform him.

It was originally written in three parts, each with seven chapters. However, for nearly 20 years two, quite different, versions were on sale. The final chapter was omitted from editions published in the US prior to 1986. In the introduction to the updated American text – which included the missing 21st chapter – Burgess explains why. When he first took the book to an American publisher he was told that readers would never go for the final chapter in which Alex recognizes the error of his ways and resolves to turn his life around. Burgess reluctantly agreed but considered this version of his novel to be “badly flawed”. Kubrick’s film adaptation is based on the early American edition of the book, without the final chapter.

Alex’s narrative is delivered in a language created by Burgess.  Nadsat is a mix of modified Russian and other Slavic terms, British rhyming slang and words which Burgess made up. He had a lot of fun with Nadsat. My favourite is horrowshow;  Nadsat  for “excellent”. It looks like an English word but comes  from the Russian word for “good”,  khorosho.

Burgess was often asked to explain the novel’s title. He usually answered that it was based on a common cockney expression, “as queer as a clockwork orange”. However, there is no record of this phrase being used before 1962. On the other hand, nadsat does have a meaning; it is the suffix for Russian numerals from 11 to 19, an almost exact linguistic parallel to the English teen. Clever, eh?

The wide-eyed image of Alex on David Pelham’s cover design reflects the teenager’s appetite for amphetamines  – and the aversion therapy which he receives in prison.