Despite Wormold’s ostentatious plan, coincidentally a man whom shares the name as the elusive pilot dies in a car crash. Soon after London sends Wormold a secretary, Beatrice Severn, Wormold’s creations begin to blend with reality when Beatrice is ordered to contact Raúl, a pilot. His imagination reaches its apex when, at one point, he maniacally decides to send a report to London which depicts vacuum cleaner parts as a secret military apparatus.
By putting his imagination to work, he instead falsifies his reports using information gathered in media and creates a network of sources that are mostly falsehoods. Perhaps due to excessive drinking, the secrecy of General Batista’s murders or, most likely, the fact that Wormold is an untrained agent, Wormold has no correspondence to send to London. Wormold is proverbially short of a quid and given his daughter’s partiality towards indulgences, Wormold accepts the part-time espionage gig. Wormold meets Hawthorne, who asks him to work for the British secret service. Aside from the implied mediocrity of Wormold’s life at present, he is also the father of a beautiful, devoutly Catholic yet grossly unscrupulous (and curiously scheming) daughter, Milly.
Set in Havana predating the Cuban Missile Crisis during the Fulgenico Batista Regime, the reader is introduced to a divorced retailer, James Wormold. This is a humorous satire of a man in a dream of luxuries including monetary savings, company shares and dividends yet, in reality is met with fanciful falsehoods, loathing and love. This time, we are introduced to Wormold, a dreamy vacuum cleaner salesman in search of secrecy as MI6’s man in Havana. Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana adds to the masterly storyteller’s vivid depictions of nomadic and faithless urbanites.
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