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Note, Jan. 17, 2024: I've just caught and corrected a typo in this review.

Greene divided his own fiction between the novels and stories he considered more serious, such as The Heart of the Matter, and those he viewed as lighter "entertainments." This relatively short (247 pages --and not all of them with text) novel is one of the latter; and like many of the "entertainments" it draws on the author's World War II experiences as a spy for Britain's M-16 intelligence agency. (And it's obvious here that these weren't experiences he looked back on fondly.) Set in pre-Castro Cuba, it also draws on Greene's personal observations from his time in Cuba in 1957, when he was secretly smuggling warm clothing to Castro's rebels in the eastern hills. (He apparently continued to admire Castro until Greene's own death in 1991, though by 1983 he had come to have second thoughts about the Cuban dictator's authoritarianism.) Despite its supposedly "lighter" tone, however, this book does make philosophical statements. It also reflects Greene's status as an ambivalent and not very saintly Catholic, who was particularly disassociated from the Church's teaching on sexual morality because of his numerous extramarital affairs; Catholicism here is mainly represented by the protagonist's teenage daughter, who's outwardly scrupulous about the minutia of religious observance, but very far from modeling responsibility and altruism.

Stylistically, this book has certain things in common with the earlier one I cited above (and which is the only other Greene novel I've read). Greene wrote well, in that his prose flows quickly, he tells an attention-holding and often suspenseful story, and that he's insightful regarding human character and interactions when he's trying to be serious. It also has in common with the other book the fact that despite the relatively exotic setting, there's little sense of a physical and cultural setting outside of the transplanted bubble of the expatriate Europeans, and what we observe of the non-European world is primarily sordid; we get the impression that the primary industry of 1957 Havana was prostitution/pornography. (What aspects of an unfamiliar place a foreign observer actually observes, of course, may tell us more about the observer than about the place itself.) Afro-Cubans are twice designated, by sympathetic characters, with the n-word (one usage slaps you over the head as the very second word in the first sentence), a term that appears in the older book as well. But this book differs in that it often tries for a tone of satirical humor in places; too often, it tries too hard, making the dialogue ridiculous and the characters and situations unrealistic caricatures, and the juxtaposition of the serious and the satirically humorous doesn't always gel.

Greene's main philosophical message here seems to be that any loyalty higher than that to family and friends --particularly, any abstract loyalty such as patriotism or support for a social principle-- is misguided and misplaced. To be sure, loyalty to human beings we love will naturally, for most of us, take precedence over loyalty to abstractions; and when it comes to guiding our actions, moral principle must always trump political or social agendas. (It should also trump family interests --swindling a bureaucracy out of money doesn't become moral if we're doing it for a son or daughter, though Greene here may come close to suggesting that it does.) But the wall-to-wall cynicism of Greene's view of the Cold War, as purely a struggle for power between morally equivalent shady rivals, which decent people would be better off to ignore, doesn't ultimately convince this reader. (And I lived through much of the Cold War period, being born in 1952.) In the broader landscape of espionage fiction, Greene's worldview is much like le Carre's in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (though the latter book is a lot more serious), rather than, say, Manning Coles.' But in hindsight, most people in the captive populations behind the Iron Curtain might well have had a perspective more similar to Coles' (while not canonizing M-16 and the CIA).