Recommendations
Books Like Our Man in Havana
Best books to read after Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
Our Man in Havana is Greene's most comic novel — the spy satire that turns deadly, organized around the gap between the fiction Wormold creates and the reality his intelligence service mistakes it for. If the novel's dark comedy and its portrait of pre-revolutionary Havana moved you, these books share its concern with the intelligence world as moral corruption, its satire of institutional stupidity, and its conviction that the line between fiction and reality is thinner than either novelists or intelligence officers like to admit.
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The Quiet American
by Graham Greene
The essential companion — Greene's most politically serious novel; the story of Pyle and Fowler in 1952 Saigon is the serious side of what Our Man in Havana satirizes; the contrast between the two novels shows the full range of Greene's political intelligence
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The Third Man
by Graham Greene
The companion in Greene's entertainments — Holly Martins in post-war Vienna investigating the apparent death of his friend Harry Lime; shares Our Man in Havana's interest in a naive man discovering that the friend he knew was someone entirely different
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The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
by John le Carré
Le Carré's breakthrough novel — the most important spy novel published in the years after Our Man in Havana and the one that most directly inherits Greene's interest in intelligence operations as moral corruption; where Greene satirizes the intelligence services, le Carré dissects them in tragedy
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
by John le Carré
Le Carré's masterpiece — the hunt for a Soviet mole in the upper reaches of British intelligence; the most complex and serious development of the territory Our Man in Havana satirizes; George Smiley is the anti-Bond, and the contrast with Wormold shows the two ends of the spy-fiction spectrum
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Casino Royale
by Ian Fleming
Fleming's debut Bond novel — the opposite pole of spy fiction from Our Man in Havana; the contrast between Fleming's celebration of intelligence service glamour and Greene's satire of its incompetence defines the two possibilities for Cold War spy fiction
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VALIS
by Philip K. Dick
Dick's autobiographical novel about a man who receives divine transmissions from a satellite and begins to question whether his reality is a fiction — the most extreme version of the question Our Man in Havana poses: what happens when you can no longer distinguish between the fiction you create and the reality others inhabit?
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Brighton Rock
by Graham Greene
The essential companion in Greene's serious work — Pinkie's terrifying Catholicism in Brighton; the novel that most directly shows what lies under the comedy of Our Man in Havana: the same moral intelligence, without the laughter
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Three Days of the Condor
by James Grady
Grady's thriller about a CIA researcher who returns from lunch to find his entire office murdered — the American parallel to Our Man in Havana in its portrait of an ordinary man suddenly discovering the reality behind the intelligence apparatus; where Greene's comedy is based on Wormold's inventions becoming real, Grady's thriller is based on a reader discovering that the fiction he analyzes for the CIA is actually happening
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