Rating: 
Summary: Comedians
Review: One of the funny things about this book--it is, after all, about comedians--is that everyone in it imagines that the Americans are going to invade any minute, or if Papa Doc collapses. As unlikely as that seemed when I first read it, now you can reread it after the Americans really did invade, or at least occupy. The comedians are all refugees of WWII: Brown's aunt fought in the resistance and Martha is the daughter of a Nazi,and Major Jones fought in Burma, or so he says. Those are strange details for Greene to add, and they also screw up the chronology if the book takes place when it was written, 1965. The earliest the aunt could have been born is 1895, which makes her 70 and much too old to have a young lover, and even then she would have had to have Brown when she was 15 if Brown is to 55, even though he is supposedly 60-ish. The comedians follow the tragedy, and they all, except for the Tontons Macoute, have very bad timing. If you want to figure out the book, it seems to me that you have to know why Martha is the daughter of a Nazi--how or why could it matter? Why that almost gratuitious allusion? The comedians are somewhere between Europe, which they fled, and the US, which is about to occupy. They are like Jones, who tries to escape the Tontons Macoute by boarding a foreign vessel which is not exactly his home, either.
Rating: 
Summary: A Novel of Haiti
Review: Set during the beginning of the reign of Papa Doc and the brutal thugs he used for his secret police, the Tonton Macoute, this novel is prophetic. Greene clearly saw the trouble coming, as he did in _The Quiet American._ He writes of the brutality, the easy murder, the poverty, and the oppression under which the Haitians lived while Papa Doc (who really was a doctor) ruled. Greene also points out the American government supported him because he was "anti-Communist," even though Papa Doc played both sides in case the Americans (who turned a blind eye to the abuses) left and he had to look to the Soviet Union for support. This novel is more ironic than satiric; Greene uses a deadpan tone to describe a woman who happens to kick the bucket during a sexual encounter. You can't figure out if it's supposed to be funny or horrible. The whole novel is like that: an almost emotionless, deadpan tone used to describe the most horrible conditions. Greene clearly doesn't think much of politics -- or "political" solutions, and clearly sees human nature as flawed.
Rating:
Summary: Major serious novel on Haiti
Review: THE COMEDIANS, with its simple plot and small cast of characters, is a vision to a country under absolute dictatorship that is perpetually serious and intense. It closely shadows there men who encounter one another on a ship bound for Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a world that evokes the surveillance-infested society in Orwell's 1984. Haiti, at least under Greene's pen, is a world in the grip of corrupt Papa Doc and his omnipresent retinue of secret police, the Tontons Macoute.
On the verge of entering a land where only nightmares are real and even more real than the people themselves, these men: a hotelier Brown, a confidence man Jones, and a seemingly eerie but innocent ex-Presidential Election candidate Smith, all imperceptibly hide behind their facades, act punctiliously, and hesitate on the edge of life. Brown is an Englishman who returns to the Haitian capital from New York looking for potential buyer of his hotel. Smith, a man who is fearless of political gestures and chicanery, devotes to a lifelong mission to lobby the government in establishing a vegetarian center. Jones, the most obscure and shady of the three, gives the impression that he is engaged on some secret project with the government. Indeed, he tries to sabotage a supply of arms to the Tontons Macoute in order to slowly rid Doc Papa of power and dissemble the tight-knitted network of secret police.
These are all comedians - living behind the mask and feigning. For a man of such ambiguity as he, whom everyone trusts so little, Jones really has a knack of winning friendship. Equally as shady but all the more embracing is Brown who harbors a secret affair with the wife of a South American ambassador. She is, however, markedly the opposite of him: she is not a comedian but is someone who is endowed with a decided directness and a virtue of straightforwardness. Not until the end of the affair does Brown dawn on the fact that she is no comedian. Brown's cowardice is always alluded to be the impediment to his being rooted deep enough to make him a home and to make him secure with love.
So much as the characters call for being comedians, Haiti and the character of Doc Papa and his rule are as real as the nightmares and horror. The Tontons Macoute was full of men more evil than Concassuer and other militant characters potrayed. The interrupted funeral and the stealing of dissidents' bodies were drawn from fact. THE COMEDIANS, though as light as its title might have alluded, is a major serious novel of Haiti and the residual aspects after the spell of torture.
Rating:
Summary: Engaging drama set in Papa Doc's Haiti
Review: The novel opens on a cruise ship steaming toward Haiti. We meet a diverse group of characters who are revealed through the device of setting them in a game of cards on board ship.
Brown, the primary character and narrator is returning to Haiti to reclaim a hotel he inherited and through his eyes we see the political changes occurring in the country and are made aware of the ominous threat of the Tonton Macoute secret police that hangs over the entire story adding dramatic tension.
Jones , his fellow passenger is revealed to be a con-man who gets by on his ability to make others laugh (one of the comedians) . Smith a failed presidential candidate from the US is naively seeking to establish a vegetarian center in Haiti seemingly oblivious to the turmoil all around him.
Brown's romance with the wife of a diplomat provides a subplot that mirrors the theme that everyone is deceiving someone. The comedians all prove to be actors playing on a stage filled with political violence and the everpresent threat of more to come.
This was a very engaging novel and if not Greene's most well known book it may be one of his best. I enjoyed it and highly recommend it for it's memorable characters and stunning evocation of a country approaching chaos.
Rating:
Summary: A solid classic
Review: This book didn't move me personally to the extent of The Power and the Glory or Brighton Rock, but it's one of Greene's richest, most dilineated and consistent narratives. The humor is top-notch, and the sense of underlying sadness is persistent; sometimes, both combine in one spectacular scene - near the end, the exhausted American altruist stands in front of a crowd of Hatian beggars, literally throwing the last of his money at them with no expression on his face. One weakness, though, is a factor which ruined a lot of his later work, his communist leanings. It's not that I object to them on principle, but I don't feel like he ever really developed a groundwork for the ideology; he just makes his bleeding-heart characters into heroes, treating it in a similiar way as his religious themes, but something as concrete as a social system has to be dealt with more concretely than religion. You can't expect someone to have faith in communism. In the end, though, the damage from this is minor; a greater problem is the weakness of several important characters, one of them the main love interest. The presence of many strong main characters does compensate for this, however. This isn't one of Greene's spy thrillers, but it still builds a nice amount of tension near the end, and occasional bursts of action keep it from getting too weighed down in the malaise which effects the characters so deeply.
Rating:
Summary: Flat but with an Involving Plot
Review: This is Brown, the narrator of "The Comedians", describing his outlook: "I had left involvement behind me...I had dropped it... I had felt myself not merely incapable of love-many are incapable of that-but even of guilt. There were no heights and no abysses in my world-I saw myself on a great plain, walking and walking on the interminable flats." In my judgment, Brown's outlook is a big shortcoming in this book. While "The Comedians" eventually centers on one of Greene's ironically heroic characters, there's not much juice (even with an affair) since the story is told by dull Brown. Bottom line: This is a good story with some personally and politically heroic characters. But this is not Greene's best work.
Rating:
Summary: THE POWER OF THE MASTERPIECE
Review: This is one of the most powerful novels ever written. I think it was the best work of Graham Greene. In this book Greene was able to achieve a very masterful dialog, and he developed so powerful an memorable characters. We can witness how the internal struggle of the main characters intermingles with the power struggle in the country and the problems of the time. This is a very strong book that should be read and known.
Rating:
Summary: THE POWER OF THE MASTERPIECE
Review: This is one of the most powerful novels ever written. I think it was the best work of Graham Greene. In this book Greene was able to achieve a very masterful dialog, and he developed so powerful an memorable characters. We can witness how the internal struggle of the main characters intermingles with the power struggle in the country and the problems of the time. This is a very strong book that should be read and known.
Rating:
Summary: A Superb Novel - One of the Best....
Review: This superb novel begins with 3 generic figures on a ship headed toward Haiti: a cynical, shady adventurer, a well-intentioned, compassionate American couple, and a man without a country - the narrator. This novel is so great -- in the tradition of Joseph Conrad, it explores moral choice in the midst of turmoil. The setting is a old-fashioned hotel in the terrifying Haitian dictatorship of Papa Doc (funded and supported by the US in the 50s). The situation is complicated by a furtive love affair, several deaths and disappearances, and the narrator's quest to find out who he is. The "unreliable narrator" device (utilized so successfully in many American novels) is absolutely brilliant here. It's also a coming-of-age novel, or is it? The narrator is struggling to find himself, but his actual age/appearance is never directly stated, and it's an intriguing puzzle. Very cinematic. The only weakness of the novel is also Conradian: its love scenes are dry, dull and unconvincing. The final sequence is grippingly suspenseful, and the resolution satisfying. Identity conflicts, questionable alliances, tough decisions, and all in the most beautiful/terrifying settings. Great great novel!
Rating:
Summary: A Good Place and strange laughter
Review: To call a novel about the most horribly repressive and violent period in Hatian history The Comedians is typical Graham Greene irony. The main characters, Jones (a Brit expatriate on the run from a never disclosed shady past), Smith (a vegetarian crusader who was once a splinter candidate for U.S. president), and Brown (a man of no real country who has inherited a run down hotel in Haiti from his absent mother) are all rootless failures playing at life who are brought together in Haiti during a time of terror and political chaos when the country was descending into a kind of primitive madness. Against their will and in ways they don't anticipate, they are each sucked into the vortex. How they respond highlights the questions that Greene is forever posing about faith, redemption, commitment and responsibility.The dreams of each character, flimsy as they are, are doomed to fail in a land where utilities and civil order have broken down, where beggers predominate and order is maintained by the Tontons Macoute, the zombie figures in dark glasses who dispense Papa Doc's brutal 'justice' and leave the evidence of it lying beside the road. Smith, who with his wife, wants to start a vegetarian center in the Haitian capitol, flees the country when he realizes that he must resort to bribes for the simplest permissions and even then the promises are a sham. Jones, who tries to con the Hatian government into buying arms that he doesn't possess, is uncovered as a fraud and flees to a South American embassy for protection (the British don't want him - or want him too much). Brown, who wants only to be left alone to run his hotel and pursue a pointless affair, nevertheless finds himself acting time and again to help one or another of the other characters (including a number of Haitians), all the while trying to remain emotionally neutral and uninvolved. He fails, and his failure brings on the book's one clear success, a good end for Jones who escapes the embassy, with Brown's assistance, to join and train a small band of Haitian guerrillas in the hills. At the end, having found 'a good place', he dies a comic but heroic death. He did not, it seems, actually know anything about warfare, having served in the army only in the entertainment division. His lies finally catching up. But as one of the Haitian survivors says - he was good for the men - he made them laugh.
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