To Have and Have Not, book review. (Ernest Hemingway)

What a strange book.

Harry Morgan is a fisherman who just got duped out of over eight hundred dollars by an American tourist (it's the 1930s by the way and the man who chartered Harry's boat, used his bate and lost his rods and reels for three weeks, has scarpered without paying), so he can no longer make a living out of fishing so, instead, he uses his boat illegally to transport both booze and people from Florida to Cuba, or Cuba to Florida.

After the tourist disappears, Harry's first 'job' is to take a dozen Chinamen from Cuba to America for the princely sum of twelve hundred dollars, but surmising a double cross, Harry makes sure he gets the drop on the ring leader and then dumps the twelve men on a local beach.

Then it's booze, which ends up with his boat being seized and him being shot at - which costs him his arm - and so, with no boat, only one arm and a family to feed, he steals a boat and ferries four Cubans from Florida back to Cuba so they can join the revolution.

There is some good writing here: the gunfight at the very beginning, his double-cross of the chief Chinaman, the night at the Veteran's bar and the ambushing of the Cubans before they get to close to home and shot him first, are all standout moments but the rest of the book just jumps around, with some of it being completely pointless.

There's seemingly random chapters about characters that have little or nothing to do with the overall story randomly interjected through the narrative, which is really weird - I can only guess that the author needed a few more 'haves' to balance against Harry and the rest of the 'have nots'.

One example is when Harry walks into Freddy's bar and calls one of the customers a whore, for the book to then shot of on a tangent and follow the loves, lives and affairs of these strangers until Harry comes back a few chapters later and the main story thread continues.

This happens again at the very end of the book when we're randomly taken from cabin to cabin of all the luxury yachts in the marina - in great detail I might add - from a man in his sixties worrying about his outstanding tax bill in America, through a family who are good and wholesome and treat everyone well and so sleep soundly, to a woman who is contemplating whether to take a sleeping draft of not, and again, I thought this was really strange. (Ironically this was one of the better written parts of the book, even though it had nothing to do with the story arc.)

So, To Have and Have Not, is good in parts but those parts are few and far between, so I can't really recommend it. Two stars.

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