The Comedians

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On Haiti andTHE COMEDIANS
"It was by accident that I came first to Haiti more than twelve years ago to join my friend Peter Brook, who was preparing there the musical play, A House of Flowers, with Truman Capote. It was then a happy period, at least for the tourists; only after my second visit a year or so later did the shadow of Doctor Duvalier descend. I made my third visit in August 1963, and now it was to the Haiti of The Comedians, of the Tontons Macoute, the searches, the road-blocks, the rebels in the hills. I would have liked to return yet a fourth time before completing my novel, but I had written in the English press a description of Doctor Duvalier's dictatorship, and the best I could do in January 1965 was to make a trip down the Dominican and Haitian border—the scene of my last chapter—in the company of two exiles from Haiti. At least, without Doctor Duvalier's leave, we were able to pass along the edge of the country we loved and to exchange hopes of a happier... Tovább

Fülszöveg

On Haiti andTHE COMEDIANS
"It was by accident that I came first to Haiti more than twelve years ago to join my friend Peter Brook, who was preparing there the musical play, A House of Flowers, with Truman Capote. It was then a happy period, at least for the tourists; only after my second visit a year or so later did the shadow of Doctor Duvalier descend. I made my third visit in August 1963, and now it was to the Haiti of The Comedians, of the Tontons Macoute, the searches, the road-blocks, the rebels in the hills. I would have liked to return yet a fourth time before completing my novel, but I had written in the English press a description of Doctor Duvalier's dictatorship, and the best I could do in January 1965 was to make a trip down the Dominican and Haitian border—the scene of my last chapter—in the company of two exiles from Haiti. At least, without Doctor Duvalier's leave, we were able to pass along the edge of the country we loved and to exchange hopes of a happier future."
—Graham Greene
THE COMEDIANS
This is Graham Greene's first novel since 1961. Set in Haiti, where terror rides and death comes frequently and swiftly in the night, it is a story of love and adventure, hope and disillusion. Like one of its predecessors, The Quiet American, it is also a story about the committed and the uncommitted. The Haitian, Doctor Magiot, is committed. His last letter to Brown, the story's narrator, is a statement and an appeal by the committed—by a man whose nature forces him to share the terrible events of his time. But the others—the comedians— have opted out. Brown, a disenchanted part-Englishman from Monaco, a hotel owner; Smith and his wife, an American couple on a good-will mission; Martha, the young German wife of a Latin-American diplomat; Jones, an engaging fool ("I divide the world into two
parts—the tofFs and the tarts____I'm a tart")
and soldier of fortune on his own mysterious business: all these play their parts—respectable or shady—in the foreground. They experience love affairs rather than love; they have enthusiasms—such as Mr. Smith's for his vegetarian answer to the world's discord—but not a faith; and if they die, they die by accident. There are other Haitians, too: henchmen of "Papa Doc," the dictator, or in secret rebellion against him. With alternating comedy, irony, and grim violence, Greene weaves these lives in a pattern of mounting suspense.
GRAHAM GREENE comes from a family with a firmly established tradition of service to education, statesmanship, and letters. He was born in Berkhampstead, Hertfordshire, in 1904. His father was headmaster of the Berkhampstead School; his uncle was Sir W. Graham Greene, long Permanent Secretary to the Admiralty; a somewhat distant cousin was Robert Louis Stevenson. Graham Greene was (Continued on back flap)
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educated at Berkhampstead School and Balliol
College, Oxford.
While still at Berkhampstead, he contributed both prose and verse to the Saturday Westminster. At Oxford he edited the Oxford Outlook and published verse in Oxford Poetry. His first published book was Babbling April (1925), a volume of verse. Since that time he has published more than a dozen novels and "entertainments"—the most popular of which include The Power and the Glory, The Quiet American, The Heart of the Matter, The Third Man, and Brighton Rock. Many of these have been made into films in the United States and England. He has also written travel books, short stories, film scripts, and essays. Among his successful plays are The Potting Shed and The Complaisant Lover.
After Oxford and a quickly abandoned job with the British American Tobacco Company, Graham Greene joined the staff of the Nottingham Journal. In 1926 he left the Journal for the London Times, and stayed with the Times until 1930. In the thirties he was a film critic for the Spectator, and edited a series of memoirs called "The Old School." During the war he did highly confidential missions for the British government in West Africa and later worked in London for the Ministry of Information. After the war he was an editor and director of Eyre and Spottiswoode, British publishers, and he is now an editorial associate of The Bodley Head, London.
He has traveled most of the world. In 1959, before writing A Burnt-Out Case, he lived in a leper colony in Africa for several weeks. On the back of this dust jacket, he tells in his own words of the experiences in Haiti that led to the writing of The Comedians.


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