Brown, Smith and Jones – the narrator comments on the comic unlikelihood of these notorious aliases appearing together, and that sets the tone…Īs soon as he arrives in Port-au-Prince, Brown re-enters the adulterous relationship with Martha, wife of a South American ambassador.

He’s been in the States for three months and the novel opens with him aboard a tramp steamer puffing to Haiti, accompanied by a handful of other guests: Mr and Mrs Smith the American evangelists for vegetarianism the loud and probably fake Englishman ‘Major’ Jones a travelling pharmaceutical salesman and a mournful black man named Mr Fernandez. It’s narrated in the first person by a middle-aged Englishman, Brown, the owner of a hotel in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The tone is equable, the style concise and expressive, the text relatively unblemished by the Catholic despair and bucket theology of his other novels, and there is a steady flow of deft descriptions and urbane ironies which, although they intertwine with some gruesome scenes, on the whole keep a slight smile permanently hovering on the reader’s lips. The Comedians is Greene’s longest novel (287 pages in the Penguin edition) and among his most enjoyable. The corpse of Dr Philipot belonged to a more tragic theme we were only a sub-plot affording a little light relief. I responded as well as I could, but the corpse in the pool seemed to turn our preoccupations into comedy. She laughed and held me still and kissed me.

The comedians book graham greene