At the mention of international intrigue and espionage, we naturally think of dashing secret agents who play roulette in Monacco while dressed in sparkling white dinner jackets. If the story involves a mad dictator, we expect his adversary to be a...
[more]At the mention of international intrigue and espionage, we naturally think of dashing secret agents who play roulette in Monacco while dressed in sparkling white dinner jackets. If the story involves a mad dictator, we expect his adversary to be a clever and precise dandy, whose smart lip can undo the tyrant's composure. And similarly, it seems only proper that Oxford-educated bons vivants keep us safe from the likes of kidnappers, extortionists, and other instigators of foul play. But the world is not so, as British author Graham Greene has taught us.
Greene fashioned narratives in which Everyman finds himself caught up in events much larger than he's used to. An innocuous, middle-class vacuum salesman, for instance, is recruited to aid the British Secret Service in Greene's 1958 novel "Our Man in Havana." This little man had previously devoted his life to raising his daughter and enjoying a foreigner's anonymity; politics and religion are a bore, and the larger world is extraneous to his personal responsibilities. Nonetheless, he becomes a reluctant secret agent -- in fact, he is so unprepared to carry out his assignment that he simply makes up information to bring back to his government.
Similarly, Smith, Brown, and Jones, the three key characters in Greene's "The Comedians," find themselves in Papa Doc Duvalier's Haiti. The three Everymen -- Brown, a hotelier without a country of his own; Smith, a one-time American presidential candidate whose idealistic platform centered around vegetarianism; and Jones, a rather mysterious British ex-army major -- wind up contributing, without much choice, to an underground campaign for freedom in a land that's not even theirs. Rerouted by circumstance, each character turns out to be incongruously suited to the role fate hands him. When forced to act, each overcomes his distaste for the world of politics long enough to make incisive decisions.
It is in this necessary action that Greene's characters achieve breadth and full humanity. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," Thoreau said, challenging the common man to think beyond quotidian existence. Greene's works are written for and about such men -- his novels offer temporary relief for the individual's existential anguish by imagining what an ordinary player might look like on an extraordinary stage. Yet in the end his characters return comfortably to their humble lives, disinterested in greatness. For Greene, that is what makes them most extraordinary.
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