Guided Tour of Greeneland

THE COMEDIANS by Graham Greene. 309 pages. Viking. $5.75.

Their names are Brown, Smith and Jones. As the story begins, Brown, the narrator of this new Graham Greene novel, wonders whether names so common as to imply insignificance must not together hint of some bad joke. Could wild chance have united the three on a freighter bound for Haiti and in the improbable events that follow? The answer is no, and it comes from Greene. His contriving hand is visible throughout, alerting and perhaps warning the reader that there is nothing in it to support, or even to deserve, belief.

Familiar Scenery. Greene's characters follow predestined paths to nowhere, past all the familiar Greeneland scenes: pursuit, betrayal, suicide, failure, adulterous love. Brown is returning to the hotel--emptied of tourists by Papa Doc Duvalier's inhospitable island regime--that he has been unable to sell in the States. Smith, a 1948 U.S. presidential candidate who polled 10,000 votes on the vegetarian ticket, dreams of converting the Haitians to a diet of Yeastrol and Nuttoline. Jones drifts in and out of focus as an ambiguous, flat-footed soldier of fortune so encircled by his enemies that Port au Prince is his last remaining port of call.

Haiti makes a perfect setting for such refugees from reality: an "evil slum floating a few miles from Florida," fretted with armed roadblocks, policed by bogeymen in black sunglasses --Papa Doc's Tontons Macoute. But

Greene has taken his readers there, or somewhere very like it, many times before. In The Power and the Glory, it was the Mexican jail cell that swallowed up the whisky priest. In A Burnt-Out Case, it was the jungle leper colony that drew Querry, the architect who has lost the very capacity to feel. In Brighton Rock, it was that violent urban netherworld where hopelessness is almost a beatitude.

Echoes Repeated. The message and even the characters of The Comedians repeat Greene's earlier themes, but only as echoes repeat their source. The misguided innocence of Alden Pyle in The Quiet American gave that book its point; the same quality now in Presidential Candidate Smith makes no detectable point at all. Brown's tormented alliance with another man's wife duplicates the plot of The End of the Affair, but not its impact. Greene's prevailing climate of disillusionment pervades The Comedians--but as a kind of emotional weather report.

What is missing from this novel is not the author's expert hand, but his heart. All Greene's best novels testify to his own obsession with the meaning or the meaninglessness of life, to his own quest for bearings along the ambiguous border between good and evil. The Comedians somehow reads as if Greene had temporarily given up the search and were merely conducting a guided tour past landmarks already found.

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