Manic Interludes

Abstract In Ways of Escape Greene wrote, ‘If A Burnt Out Case in 1961 represented the depressive side of a manic-depressive writer, Travels with my Aunt eight years later surely represented the manic at its height or depth.’ I would extend this comment to say that all the appearances of the Greene Man enacted the depressive side, with occasional incursions of the manic, as in the farcical episodes in The Comedians. The manic vein was already evident in some of Greene’s writings of the 1950s, such as the light-hearted novella Loser Takes All, where an English accountant on his honeymoon in Monte Carlo finds a way of winning large sums at the gaming tables. Greene wrote it as a satirical but affectionate tribute to his friend Alexander Korda. This vein was then triumphantly expressed in a comic novel, Our Man in Havana. Greene called it an ‘entertainment’; in the everyday sense of that word it is much more entertaining than The Ministry of Fear, his previous book in that subsequently abandoned category. The novel is set in Havana, in the final years of the Batista dictatorship; Greene later acknowledged that he had played down the violence and corruption of that playground for Western tourists.