Headline : A useful companion volume
This book sent me back to read the original novel and view the resulting film. Both were enriched by ‘Our Man Down In Havana”.
Hull uses Graham Greene’s visits to Havana to document the fall of Batista and emergence of the Castro regime. He explores Greene’s motivations and loyalties whilst not hesitating to point out the inconsistencies of a flawed character.
It was interesting to consider just how much of Greene’s writing reflected his own experience (it appears to have been very much the case) and how prescient he seems to have been about what later transpired during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
There are lessons too if not direct parallels between US actions at the time in Cuba and Latin America generally and recent Russian military involvement in nearby states and secret agent work in places like Salisbury.
I was also not aware of the ironic nature of the Bay of Pigs debacle – the invaders vessels were hit by British aircraft supplied originally to Batista. This seems to have been a key element in Castro repelling the US-backed forces.
It might be argued that Hull spins too long a tale from relatively flimsy evidence but at the end of the day his book is a useful companion volume to Greene’s novel.
This book was provided as an advance copy by the publisher in return for an honest review.
Note :
This book was reviewed on Amazon on 7 April 2019.

I have always enjoyed the writing of Graham Greene and several of his books have stayed with me even though I first read them some 40 years ago.
Our man in Havana is a different type of novel and like The Third Man has grown beyond the written page due to the subsequent movie releases.
This compelling and quite captivating biography of Greene unites the writing of the book and making of the film. It focuses on Greene’s political and governmental roles especially his experience of espionage. It is a story filled with external literary sources so that anyone reading Our man down in Havana will not feel short changed.
How Greene came to visit Cuba pre Revolution and perhaps why he continued to visit the island?
What is fascinating is that Cuba and Havana is the peg on which this work into Greene’s life can be hung and measured. How he came to meet Castro; why and what motivated him to return. His articles; his association with other writers and poets. His disquiet with US policy as seen in later books. How this book was planned some years before and how chance brought it to Havana. How subsequently it was prophetic in terms of the missile crisis, defections in the secret service and also a foreshadowing of the Iraq invasion and WMD.
The writer understands Greene and it is a work well researched and never misses the literary connections. So the prom at Brighton is linked with Havana’s wonderful curved promenade and the two novels further talked about.
Beyond all these reasons for reading this book. Here is a work that helps you understand the writing process, how a novel like Our Man in Havana comes to be written and generates a film. For fans of movies and novels these are precious insights but the main topic covered is Graham Greene himself and as stated it provides a critical but warm biography of one of our best authors. It can only promote Greene’s writing and temper our judgement on our heroes. In today’s age of social media we seem to know everything of a modern writer’s life. A glimpse into a former generation shows faults and failings but hopefully an integrity that allows our increased knowledge to be enhancing rather than upsetting.
Graham Greene was an imperfect man but in such an open and widely source account such as this we gain far more than just wanting to place such figures on a pedestal. I have found out more about the man but it is the author and his creative writing that I treasure and this book for me cements his reputation and gives one cause to read still more widely.

I love books about books and I love Graham Greene, so I was excited to find Christopher Hull’s Our Man Down in Havana, the story behind the inspiration and writing of Greene’s spy satire Our Man in Havana. Hull has clearly done his research, and he is obviously well-versed in Cuban history. This, however, was the problem with the book for me: there was just so much information presented that it often got bogged down in tiny details from Greene’s childhood, his years in Britain’s intelligence service during WWII, the history of Cuba—even what Greene ate on each of his visits to the island. I understand that some of this is necessary for an understanding of how Our Man in Havana reflected Greene’s experiences and the era in which he was writing, but I just thought tighter editing would have made the story clearer and elevated this book to the status of Lesley Blume’s Everybody Behaves Badly, about the writing of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Still, the book was enjoyable for me as a fan of Greene and Our Man in Havana—which I would highly recommend reading before sitting down with this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and WW Norton for providing me with an ARC of this book in return for my honest review.

Having recently read both Our and Hitler's Man in Havana, this book made a good piece to the trilogy. It examines Graham Greene's writing of his book and contemporary Cuban history - a pretty amazing story.