The Comedians

Greene had visited Haiti a number of times prior to the publication of The Comedians in 1966, and painfully witnessed the deterioration of a fashionable bohemian enclave into a fear-riddled personal fiefdom; a regime that would ultimately cost the lives of an estimated 30,000 Haitians. A journalist at heart, Greene was emboldened to expose this tragedy to a largely disinterested press. However, as critic Francis Wheen notes in his introduction, ‘Greene sensed that the most wounding assault on a vain dictator was not so much howls of rage as gales of mocking laughter.’ The resulting work was the blackest of comedies, at once confronting the chaos of Papa Doc’s bizarre society, and, with effortless skill, propelling the reader on a tale of political intrigue, deception and self discovery.

Sara Ogilvie’s nine black-and-white images, mirroring the absurdity of the environment, expertly juxtapose the sublime with the ridiculous, from the brutal suicide of a government minister to a cross-dressing escape-plan. A Tonton Macoute, in trademark dark glasses, grins menacingly from her cover design.

Francis Wheen is a journalist, writer and broadcaster. He won the Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1999 for his biography of Karl Marx, and his collected journalism, Hoo-hahs and Passing Frenzies, won the Orwell Prize in 2003. Recent works include Marx’s Das Kapital: A Biography (2006) and Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia (2009). He often broadcasts on BBC Radio 4, is a regular panelist on Have I Got News For You and The News Quiz, and is deputy editor of Private Eye.