Must we take a side? Set in Vietnam during the 1950's, The Quiet American explores the unheroic world of post-colonial compromise through the relationship between Fowler (a British correspondent) and Pyle (the quiet American of the title). Graham Greene mixes a murder mystery with a cautionary tale of involvement in Vietnam, and he peppers it with precise and discrete character observations. This short novel is rich in new experience for me. I travel Saigon’s sun-splintered streets in a trishaw, and I squint at golden rice fields, set against a lush riot of green. After firing off a daily cable to my editors back in London, I drink Scotch with other correspondents at the bar of the Hotel Continental until I can escape back to my flat where I meet my naked Vietnamese girlfriend, who has a head start, smoking our opium. Occasionally, I can be coaxed out of the comforts of Saigon to report the events of the First Indochina War. Doing so, I run out of petrol and spend a night in the bush while Viet Minh creep about with RPGs trying to kill me. I see rotting corpses floating in canals while on patrol with French paratroopers, and I fly a bombing sortie with the Squadron Gascogne. I visit a whorehouse in Cholon and witness a Caodaist festival in Tanyinh. Nowhere is one safe. One minute, we eat ice cream in a parlor; the next, we scrape brain matter from our shoes. Greene provides precise observations about his characters. Pyle (symbolic of American imperialism in Asia) is “impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.” Believing that the USA has clean hands, Pyle is convinced that his country can succeed in Vietnam where the corrupt French colonizers failed. The puppy in Pyle wants to be liked, so “he was very meticulous about small courtesies.” “Pyle”– as in “pile of shit!”– is really not all that quiet. In fact, he talks too much. He should be listening. Does Greene’s title imply that the only really quiet American is a dead American?Fowler, the narrator (symbolizing cynical European colonialism), is the opposite of Pyle because he does not want to become involved. Fowler hits the opium pipe four times each night in order to face the future. He knows himself and the depth of his own selfishness. Fowler is a man without beliefs and without commitment to people, countries, or causes. Having no ideals, he congratulates himself that, technically, he cannot be a hypocrite. To Fowler, a passion for truth is a western disease (like alcoholism) and “love” is mere euphemism for sentimentalism. A jungle of contradictions, Fowler: rejects permanence and longs for it; envies those who believe in God and distrusts them; believes the sacrament of confession is for only the weak, but regrets he has no one to whom he may confess. Fowler declares, “I don’t take sides. I’m not engagé.” Fowler disputes Pascal’s wager, and replies that it is better to not bet at all. Inspector Vigot (Pascal) replies, "but you have embarked and have already bet, you just don’t know it. You are engagé, Monsieur Fowler." Despite his protestations, he is a partial apologist for French colonialism (87-88) and for North Vietnamese commissars (89). Phuong, the “love-interest” over whom Pyle and Fowler struggle, symbolizes Vietnam. Her name means “Phoenix,” but her delicate body is framed by "bones as fragile as a birds." She crushes Fowler's opium and recites for him, in slavish detail, the plot of the American movies, which Fowler hates. Phuong expects Fowler to divorce his wife so that she will become the second Mrs. Fowler and return with him to London, “home of skyscrapers and the Statute of Liberty.” In addition to reading for experience and to meet interesting characters, I read for ideas. The most remarkable idea in "The Quiet American" was Greene's rejection of the Domino Theory of communism in South East Asia. “You and your like are trying to make war with the help of people who are just not interested. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?” This would not be a remarkable insight if Greene were writing in 2015, but this book was published in 1956. Thus, Greene accurately predicted disaster for Vietnam (and the U.S.)-- 12 years before the peak U.S. effort in 1968 and 19 years before the fall of Saigon in 1975. Unlike the American caricatures in this book, I am not deaf to irony and sarcasm, and I understand his rage against the blind stupidity of western powers toward Vietnam in the late 1950's. Greene (the conflicted writer; Catholic believer; and serial adulterer) expresses: “One day something will happen, you will take a side. One has to take sides if one wants to remain human.” Greene reminds me that, between doctrine and human beings, I must side with human beings.
"War and Love -- they have always been compared."Like The End of the Affair, this is a Greene novel that affects you viscerally. It is a war novel, set in Vietnam. Being so, it is not cheerful or pretty: dead children lying in the street and the like. It hits on the complexities of war; the complexity of morals: how it's impossible to stay neutral forever on such matters when you’re directly involved: you have to make a decision: you must decide, or you're as good as dead."'You can rule me out,' I said. 'I'm not involved. Not involved,' I repeated. It had been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action -- even an opinion is a kind of action." It's something our protagonist fights, and it’s a recurring theme: "Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that's why men have invented God -- a being capable of understanding. Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bam-boozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers."Greene has proven to me that he articulates internal struggles exceptionally well: the ruminating but judgmental mind, the bustling churnings of the inside. And I’m not sure anybody articulates the dark side of love better than he does. Our protagonist here has a quick mind; cold but keen, with an accurate view of the world, and a hardened heart."To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable of honour -- the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two. Perhaps I was no longer in love but I remembered."But you see, love even makes the toughest of us feel pain."Her pain struck at my pain: we were back at the old routine of hurting each other. If only it were possible to love without injury -- fidelity isn't enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation."These quotes bite because they're so true. They are painful and real."I wish I could have those nights back. I'm still in love, Pyle, and I'm a wasting asset. Oh, and there was pride, of course. It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too."But the beauty of it; it's still there; it doesn't fully go away; and these flashes of beauty live in the memory forever:"I shut my eyes and she was again the same as she used to be: she was the hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain hour of the night, and the promise of rest."Oh yeah, and there's plenty of intellectual heft to this, too: the story of the quiet American is a discerning model -- a microcosm if you will -- of the United State's idealism with respect to Vietnam. Greene pulls this off in a clever fashion: Pyle’s good intentions are endearing, even admirable at times -- but they are also ignorant, and therefore dangerous.This novel will grab hold of you; and by the end -- as with most good pieces of literature -- you'll be a little more worldly and wiser because of it.
What do You think about The Quiet American (2004)?
Easily one of my all-time favorite books, but it's hard to explain why. A naive American CIA operative, fresh from Yale, arrives in Vietnam and promptly steals the narrator's Vietnamese lover/prostitute, then gets himself and several Vietnamese killed. The narrator is a cynical British war correspondent who is a) addicted to opium, b) desperately in love with the Vietnamese prositute as only a drug-addicted war correspondent can be, c) wise enough to see the Yalie's folly and d) a surprisingly sympathetic character despite all that.You can read this book on multiple levels - it can be simply a dark spy thriller (rumor has it that Greene was an MI6 operative who used his writing as a cover. If you can win a Pulitzer Prize or whatever when writing is just your cover job, then you're pretty darn good) or it can be an allegory for the old, cynical British empire (the correspondent) handing the torch of world leadership to the earnest, naive and ultimately dangerous Americans (the Yalie) or it can be a warning of what happens when superpowers and spies wade into local politics without a clue.
—Sarah
I should have read "The Quiet American" decades ago, in part because I lived through the anti-Vietnam War protests at Berkeley. And even more so, because I worked in Stanford's Hoover Archives with the Lansdale papers. Mostly I regret reading books I "should" read. While I'm ambivalent about Graham Greene himself, his troubling book should have been more widely read, and attentively studied, when it came out in 1955, a clear warning. Greene's narrator Thomas Fowler is treacherously loutish, misogynistic, anti-American, and worst of all unappetizing. Yet: This book was chillingly prescient back then in 1955, clearly so now that the story has played itself out. The craftsmanship of the plot and the seemingly plain language make the truth compelling and interesting to read. I've tried to read lots of true stories, just couldn't bear the banality, but Graham Greene knows how to weave a tale. Some writers have a periscope and can see what's really going on above the waves, and in this book Greene's periscope is functioning perfectly. The roots of the American tragedy in Vietnam are plainly revealed, even before it all happened. Like Tolstoy's "War and Peace," this book is equally about the tragedy of war and the mystery of marriage. Sounds weird but he makes it work. There is a Madama Butterfly thing going on. Not my favorite part of the book.Back to Lansdale. Greene was adamant: Alden Pyle is not based on Lansdale. The manuscript was almost completed by 1952 before Lansdale was officially stationed in Vietnam. Yes, but it came out in 1955 when he was officially there. Lansdale saw himself in Pyle. Lansdale was adamant: Pyle has a pet dog, Lansdale was the only "GI" allowed a pet dog. Pyle was close to General The. Only Lansdale was close to General The. Pyle advocates a "third way." Lansdale was the major proponent of a "third way." Lansdale was famous in intelligence circles (where Greene was a privileged guest) before 1952 for putting down a communist (Huk) rebellion in the Philippines. And the force of narrative was to have Lansdale repeat his success in the next hotspot, Vietnam. Greene knew it wouldn't work in Vietnam the way it did in the Philippines. But he denied Lansdale's role in his novel. Early on Greene had encountered another American with the same zeal and misguided mission. Whether or not he also knew about Lansdale, his observations were acute, and his fiction sadly came true.
—Elena
Graham Greene is an artist of sarcasm and loathful protagonists. 'The Quiet American' follows in that tradition, but delves into what that means and turns the whole thing on its head. The main character, Fowler, is as foul as his name implies; swearing, drinking, smoking opium, and cheating on his wife with a nubile young Vietnamese girl. Conversely , we are shown the eponymous 'Quiet American', Pyle, who is quiet in that he is sweet, naive, doesn't drink, doesn't do drugs, doesn't fornicate, is sincere, etc. Fowler comes off as the black clothed man with a twisted moustache to the blonde, muscular cliche that would be applied to Pyle. In all actuallity virtue lies entirely with the character of Fowler and the character of Pyle is toxic, birthing death and destruction from his naivete and ignorance. The backdrop of the story is Vietnam circa 1955 when the Vietminh movement was still fighting the French Colonial Forces. Fowler is a British journalist stationed in Indochina where he comes to meet an American government man, Pyle. Through Fowler, we see the fall of French imperialism and the rise of American Far Eastern imperialism. This book is interesting to read while keeping in mind the Bush Administration's expeditions into Afghanistan and Iraq.
—Alger
