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FREEDOMWAYS
THIRD QUARTER 1966
  GRIPPING NOVEL THAT'S SAYING SOMETHING 

THE COMEDIANS. By Graham Greene. The Viking Press, New York. 309 pages. $5.75.

In a letter to his friend A.S. Frere which serves as a preface to The Comedians, author Graham Greene includes the customary protective statement to the effect that the personages in the novel are all imaginary, even though, as he admits "a physical trait taken here, a habit of speech, an anecdote-they are boiled up in the kitchen of the unconscious and emerge unrecognizable even to cook in most cases." But, the author makes clear, poor Haiti itself and the character of Doctor Duvalier's rule are not invented, the latter not even blackened for dramatic effect. "Impossible to deepen that night," declares Mr. Greene.

And indeed, Brown, the "I" of the narrative, introduces the reader to a nightmare world, in which fantastic beings live and move and finally cease to exist. The mysterious Mr. Jones; the gigantic and gentle Dr. Magiot; Concasseur, the Ton-ton Macoute; Mr. Smith, would-be evangel of vegetarianism to Haitians; the narrator's mother, the soi-disante "Comtesse de Lascot-Villiers"" the narrator himself who cuckolds a Latin American ambassador, runs perilous errands, and lives to tell the tale; these, and others no less interesting for being less prominently depicted, make for a novel that creates and maintains an almost unbearable suspense. It is a gripping story, skillfully told, and makes a tremendous impact. But this is what one by now expects as matter of course from the master story-teller Graham Greene.

Beneath the surface of the story as story, however, this reviewer finds, or believes he finds, a message and a meaning, of which the story itself serves as a parable. And this message, that much is horribly amiss in the Republic of Haiti, would appear to raise some interesting questions about U.S. relations with the "black Republic" of Haiti which, as Mr. Greene asserts, he has not created out of his imagination, but has depicted as he knew it. (In a blurb on the book jacket he notes that having made his first visit to Haiti more than twelve years ago, he has since made three subsequent visits. The last one, in January 1965, was made after he had written in the English press an account of Dr. Duvalier's Haiti; as a result the best he could do then was to make a trip down the Dominican and Haitian border.)

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