Most of the characters in Graham Greene's novels inhabit a special world that Smith, a lead writer for the Daily Express, calls Greeneland. With the exception of Sierra Leone, one of the few places that Greene found pleasing, Greeneland is a dark place: Mexico during the religious persecutions of the 1930s; Vietnam at the height of the war to overturn the French colonists; Cuba just before Castro's revolution; Haiti under Duvalier; Paraguay and Argentina under the military dictators Stroessner and Videla. Emulating Greene's desire to test himself by exploring these often cruel and dangerous countries, Smith visited them to see how they'd changed. She stayed in hotels where Greene stayed, talked with people he knew, and discovered that, with the notable exception of now violently shattered Sierra Leone, everything was about the same, even after civil wars and political changes. The resulting book is a lively but grim travelogue in which she compares her own perceptive observations with the settings of such books as The Lawless Roads, The Power and the Glory
and Our Man in Havana. While Smith does not seem to share her subject's excessively pessimistic view of humanity (Greene "never stopped picking at the scab of the human condition"), she finds only a few bright spots, such as the southern part of Vietnam, which impressed her as beautiful and exotic, and Haiti, where she loved the people even though she found the country "a total slum." The vivid and perspicacious descriptions in this fascinating first book evoke the powerful impression that the outlook for the countries of Greeneland remains unreservedly bleak. (Dec. 5)
