Our terrible notions of duty... (The Quiet American - Graham Greene)

Member Name: cb361

Product:	The Quiet American - Graham Greene
Date:	12/12/03 (999 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great Writing, Complex plot, Thought-provoking

Disadvantages: None

This is the patent age of new inventions
For killing bodies, and for saving souls
All propagated with the best intentions

Byron

I first came across The Quiet American in my Chinese girlfriend's bookcase, its spine bound in Penguin orange. Watercolour flames were roaring on the front cover and a man quietly watched the burning tropical forest.

The story begins on a sweltering dangerous evening in Saigon, in a dingy apartment on the rue Catinat. In the north, the colonial French are bogged down in a bloody guerrilla war with the Communists, but here as yet, only the occasional grenade or sly factional murder disturbs the city. As evening turns to night the visitor that English war reporter Thomas Fowler is waiting for, American Aid worker Alden Pyle fails to come and Fowler goes down to the street to look for him.

I turned to go indoors when I saw a girl waiting in the next
doorway. I couldn't see her face, only her white silk trousers and
the long flowered robe, but I knew her for all that. She had so often
waited for me to come home at just this place and hour.
"Phuong," I said - which means Phoenix, but nothing nowadays is
fabulous and nothing rises from the ashes. I knew before she had time
to tell that she was waiting for Pyle too.

Phuong is Pyle's fiancé, but long before he ever came to Vietnam she was Fowler's mistress. Pyle fell in love with her, and determined that she would be better off married to him than the lover of an aging European whose long-estranged Catholic wife refuses to divorce him. The keyword was marriage. Pyle believed in being 'involved'. Fowler asks her if she will wait upstairs.

She followed me upstairs. I thought of several ironic and unpleasant
jests I might make, but neither her English nor her French would have been
good enough to understand the irony, an
d, strange to say, I had no desire
to hurt her or even to hurt myself. When we reached the landing all the
old women turned their heads, and as soon as we had passed their voices
rose and fell as though they were singing together.
"What are they talking about?"
"They think I have come home."

As Phuong and Fowler slip into their old routines, there is a knock on the door, but it isn't Pyle. Instead, a Vietnamese policeman conducts the pair to the French Sureté where Inspector Vigot sits tired and depressed with a volume of Pascal open on his desk.


"What do you know about Pyle? Please answer my questions Monsieur
Fowler. Please believe me, this is very serious."
"I am a friend," I said. "Why not? I shall be going home one day, won't
I? I can't take her with me. She'll be all right with him. It's a
reasonable arrangement. And he's going to marry her, he says. He might,
you know. He's a good chap in his way. Serious. Not like those noisy
bastards at the Continental. A quiet American."
Vigot said "Yes." he seemed to be looking for words on his desk with
which to convey his meaning as precisely as I had done. "A very quiet
American."
"Is he in the mortuary?" I asked Vigot.
"How did you know he was dead?" It was a foolish policeman's question,
unworthy of the man who read Pascal.

Pyle's body lies like a tray of ice deep in the Sureté, murdered near the bridge to Dakow where the far side on the river is in the hands of the Vietminh after dark.

"Well he might have been murdered by the Vietminh. Or he might have been
killed by the Vietnamese sureté - it's been known. Perhaps he was killed by
the Caodists because he knew General Thé.
Perhaps he was killed by General
Thé because he knew the Caodists. Perhaps he was killed by the Hoa-Haos for
making passes at the General's concubines. Perhaps he was killed by someone
who wanted his money."
"Or a simple case of jealousy," Vigot said.
"Are you really looking for the people who killed him?"
"No," Vigot said. "I'm just making a report, that's all. So long as
it's an act of war - well, there are thousands killed every year."

Later, back at his apartment, Fowler tries to break the news to Phuong.

"Pyle est mort. Assassiné."
There was no scene, no tears, just thought - the private thought of
somebody who has to alter a whole course of life.
"You had better stay here tonight," I said.
Once again, after so many months I was not alone and yet I thought
suddenly with anger, remembering Vigot and his eye-shade in the police
station and the quiet corridors of the American Legation with no one
about and the soft hairless skin under my hand. "Am I the only one who
really cared for Pyle?"

And so Fowler begins to relate the story of his relationship with the young, idealistic Pyle who in innocence was so intent to do good. For his best friend's mistress, for Vietnam, for Democracy and for Freedom. For the whole world. As Fowler grimly recites, "Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."

The Book

The Quiet American is a remarkably rich novel. It doesn't touch two-hundred pages but weaves themes and questions that are arguably more relevant today than in the 1950s when it was written. Chief among these is the degree to which we all hurt other peop
le through our beliefs and the vain notion that we know what's best, not just for them but for all concerned. On the global level, and on the personal. This often takes the form of criticising American Interventionism, but I believe that the messages are deeper than any one particular time or culture.

The story is told exquisitely, as I have tried to illustrate in these excerpts. There is hardly a wasted word yet a tremendous amount of colour and personality shine through. Somewhere on the cover of my copy Graham Greene is trumpeted as the greatest English writer of the Twentieth Century, and based on this novel I might well agree. The writing is very masculine, this is an observation, not a criticism. Francis Bacon might once have hoped to find out that Greene was homosexual, but it's clear to anyone who reads this book that the author is straight. I find the writing a joy to read, though I don't know if female readers would find so much to enjoy. It's not chauvinistic, but the male inability to understand women shows through, intentionally mixed up with westerners inability to understand the oriental.

Some have proposed that the three main characters, Phuong, Fowler and Pyle represent Vietnam, Britain and America. Generally I resist this idea because I feel it diminishes the finely drawn, believable characters, but it does have a taste of truth. It's easy to see some national parallels in the tired pugnacious Fowler and idealistic naive Pyle. Phuong is more of a problem. She moves quietly through the story very much like Vietnam itself, allowing herself to be alternately loved or used by Westerners who can't help but project their own attitudes onto her, yet keeping herself intact. Whether this is representative of Vietnamese or simply Greene not understanding women, I can't say for certain. I know that he can write strong female characters and spent time with Vietnamese so I give him the benefit of the d
oubt.

My girlfriend is rather less philosophical on the issue, and insists that all the native girls want to do is marry a foreigner and get out of the country. She went on to tell me about a girl she knew long ago in Taiwan who married a GI without a second thought, only to find that when he left the army he took her back with him to his old job as a shoe shiner. This led her on to the tender tale of the Taiwanese and American students who had to walk on opposite sides of the road till they were far away from their college. Only then could they hold hands without risk of being recognised by anyone they knew.

She is able to dismiss The Quiet American as a good story, but ultimately just a bunch of stuff that happened. If I could do the same I might not keep coming back to re-read it, to try to further triangulate the moral issues involved. Few readers can fail to collaborate with Fowler in the decisions he ultimately makes, but aren't my own views rather closer to those of Pyle's? Who but the simple or innocent would dare to quantify the 'necessary' of a necessary evil? But to choose not to do so is just as much to be 'engagé'. After all, I never believed in Weapons of Mass Destruction anyway, but choose that if blood had to be spilled then it should be on the battle-field, not in torture chambers. And an equal, tiny percentage of it is on my hands as those who didn't want it in their name. That, unfortunately, was never a choice on offer.

In the time since reading The Quiet American, it has become one of my favourite novels, for the quality of its writing, the depth of its characters, the colour and flavour of Vietnam and for the fact that I've never been able to reconcile the moral ambiguity in the story.

Looking back through this review, I notice that I've concentrated far more on my reaction to the book than the book itself. Partly this is because I've been trying to describe
the story without giving anything away, and to resist the temptation to copy out my favourite paragraphs. If I did that, this review would be almost the length of its subject. Just one more.

Nothing had changed since my last visit. The cat and the dog moved from
floor to cardboard box to suitcase, like a couple of chess knights who
cannot get to grips.

The Film

Not long after I read the novel, a film adaptation starring Michael Caine and Brendon Fraser was finally released. It had been held back from the previous year in view of the September 11th atrocities, and while I can appreciate that those events make the story more painful, they make the film still more relevant.

The acting is very good, Caine is spot on for the role of Fowler and the beautiful landscape and culture of Vietnam shine through. The film is a strong adaptation of a complex plot but it's partly spoiled for me by the re-casting of Pyle as a benign James Bond villain. The damage that we cause in our innocence in the one of the story's pivots, but the pathos vanishes if the innocence was pretend all along. Pyle might stop to wipe blood off his shoe when faced with an atrocity but this is not a gesture of indifference, rather that he can't comprehend what he is seeing. "You can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity,"

Strangely, the film comes across as more anti-American than the book, and goes rather easy on the communists. Least the book describes some of their share of the war's atrocities. Also, it's perhaps the only film adaptation I can think of which ends more darkly than the novel upon which it's based. Maybe this is because in 1955 Greene thought he saw light at the end of the tunnel, but we have hindsight and if I had just now read Byron's words I would think them written yesterday.

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