The Quiet American (Graham Greene)
This post is part of Commonplace Classics, wherein I read the books we all know and sometimes love.
I don't remember which Graham Greene novel I read first as a teenager in the mid-90s, but I have a feeling it was Stamboul Train, Our Man In Havana, or The Ministry of Fear. I liked spy fiction, and those books sounded enough like spy fiction to attract me. They were in the Penguin Classics livery, which was worrying, because usually Penguin Classics didn't look like they were even trying to be fun. But at least the Greenes were in the green(e) spine editions, with stylish black and white photographic covers instead of details from grim old oil paintings. What's more, Greene was only a few years dead, so how fusty could he possibly be? He probably died knowing who Prince was. Maybe he owned a Rubik's Cube.
I read those three novels, and some others, and Twenty-One Short Stories. I mostly enjoyed Greene's writing, but there were aspects that went over my head - a not uncommon experience at the time, or indeed now. Greene's Catholicism was particularly difficult to parse, as my family were Anglican/Lutheran and the entirety of my knowledge of Catholic theology derived from Monty Python's "Every Sperm Is Sacred". I didn't understand - and I still don't - Greene's division of his work into "entertainments" and "serious" novels, because the entertainments often had serious underpinnings and the so-called serious books were (usually) entertaining. (Greene dispensed with this awkward taxonomy in the late 50s.) I do remember being awed by The Power and the Glory, which I thought extremely profound and more or less incomprehensible. That's one I would like to read again.
Greene's 1955 novel The Quiet American, which I had not read until last week, is a non-"entertainment" although it contains many genre elements and is undeniably entertaining. But it's also a serious novel about serious things, so be sure to don sock and buskin before reading. 1950s French Indochina is no place for mucking around. Bitter, world-weary laughter only, s'il vous plaît.
The Quiet American is narrated by English journalist Thomas Fowler, your classic down-and-out colonial hack who has escaped a bad marriage and a series of disastrous flings and settled in war-torn Vietnam to find himself a nice easy death. Fowler has shacked up with a local woman, Phuong, developed an opium habit, and is determinedly noncommittal when it comes to the turmoil that surrounds him. He's totally Switzerland, man, and just wants to get blitzed, play Xbox1, hang out with his girl, and indulge in bouts of thanatic self-pity. Is that too much to ask?
Enter Alden Pyle, a quiet American2. Pyle is something vague with the US government, which is increasing its presence in the region as the French capitulate to the Viet Minh. He's an earnest, wholesome fella, bursting with stars-and-stripes dreams of imposing democracy on Southeast Asia by supporting the activities of "Third Force" operatives, ie. local warlords. He's also keen to steal Phuong away from Fowler, a piece of business he undertakes with the same determined aw-shucks earnestness that he brings to funnelling arms to terrorists. As Fowler says, "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."
From a literary perspective, I can't fault The Quiet American. Greene's depiction of colonial Saigon and the battlegrounds in the north is vivid, as you would expect from a writer who wasn't afraid to traipse around the world's conflict zones. Fowler's voice is pitch-perfect, a self-loathing yet half-likeable figure, cynical to the extreme, and given to Chandler-esque zingers. Likewise Pyle is a brilliantly realised character, a kind of technocratic, prelapsarian Harry Lime.
Predictably, Phuong is a less well rounded figure. There are a handful of minor Vietnamese characters, but otherwise this is very much a Euro-American drama, which is regrettable. I'm not here to apply a purity test to a seventy-year-old novel, but the dissonance inherent in the book's perspective is sometimes difficult to get past. For instance, Fowler chides Pyle for infantilising the Vietnamese, but his own argument for leaving them alone rests on the supposed eternal, unchanging nature of the Asian character: "If I believed in your God and another life, I'd bet my future harp against your golden crown that in five hundred years there may be no New York or London, but they'll be growing paddy in these fields, they'll be carrying their produce to market on long poles, wearing their pointed hats." There are few moments of outright racism, but when they appear it's enough to make you draw a little frowny face in the margin: "voices have a colour too: yellow voices sing and black voices gargle, while ours just speak".
It's hard not to read The Quiet American as the prophetic text of postwar American interventionism. The European colonial empires are failing, but here to save the day is the Uncle Sam's best boy Alden Pyle, willing to do the hard work of seeding "democracy" no matter how many people have to die along the way. The correlative Greene is working with is obvious: the love triangle between Fowler, Pyle and Phuong reflects the political triangle between the "old colonials" (the British, French, etc.), and the new (the Americans), with the Vietnamese occupying an ambiguous and contingent place in the middle. At times this feels overdetermined, but Greene is careful not to apply too rigid a schema. He even anticipates criticism, having a French airman tell Fowler that "War and love - they have always been compared."
In The Quiet American universe, and perhaps our own, neutrality isn't an option. Pyle's arrival forces Fowler to become involved in the political arena, and (even less willingly) in his own destiny. But just as there is no way to avoid involvement ("Sooner or later... one has to take sides - if one is to remain human"), there is no way to be involved and not cause harm, one way or another. Perhaps only the guilty have any hope of making a positive difference, because they at least possess a conscience. Fowler is a wreck of a man, but Pyle is a holy monster. "God save us always... from the innocent and the good."
*
The next stop on the Commonplace Classics decommissioned roller coaster is Sylvia Plath's only novel, The Bell Jar.