This is a strange concoction - a couple of short stories bodged together into a novel with heavy padding for at least a third of it. And yet it works - works as well as the two major novels I have previously reviewed on this blog, and a sight better than The Old Man and the Sea which I have repeatedly tried and failed to read.
The short stories tell of Harry Morgan, a 'Conch' or societal dropout in Key West, a former rum runner turned arms and people smuggler. The padding, in an utterly different tone, revolves around the bringing home of Harry's body after his last attempt to raise some cash and the effect this has on the drunken wastrels and society homosexuals who are drawn to spend time in the lawless fleshpots of the Florida Keys. It is a testament to Hemingway's inimitable style that you keep on reading, no matter how reprehensible Harry's actions, no matter how sordidly the rich folk behave. Between this and the previous blog post on T C Boyle I started on a well-known modernist classic written perhaps six or seven years before To Have and Have Not, and it was so childish, so full of itself, that I gave up and reached for Hemingway. That is how good he was and remains.
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