"Hail Mary, quite contrary", prays convent-educated Milly, aged four. For once, Greene's Roman Catholic hang-ups, which make novels such as The End of the Affair so desolate, are kept in check - even joked about. And the pukka but totally barmy whisper of the British Secret Service chief in his London bunker, who wears a monocle but can't see that the drawings of 1950s enemy WMDs sent in by their newly recruited undercover agent in Havana look remarkably like vacuum cleaner spares. And the strangulated Spanish of the loathsome Captain Segura - the Red Vulture as he is known to his torture victims - who wants to marry Wormold's beautiful daughter, Milly. I 'd forgotten that Greene could be so funny, but maybe it's just the brilliant way that Jeremy Northam has caught the ironic tone of the book's unlikely hero, James Wormold, who sells vacuum cleaners (not very successfully) in pre-Castro Cuba.
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