The Quiet American

Graham Greene – The Quiet American

I enjoyed this so much that I suspect I might spend my summer horsing through the rest of Greene’s oeuvre: it is very good indeed.  I think a mark of its worth is the means by which I chose it — I went to my teetering pile of unread books, chose three or four at random, and sat down with the intention of reading 10 or so pages of each to decide which I wanted next.  The Quiet American was second in this sequence, and I became so engrossed in its first few pages that I abandoned the rest of the books in the sequence for another day.

It is a story narrated by Thomas Fowler, an English war correspondent reporting on the French war in Vietnam.  Fowler has constructed for himself a comfortable life there, complete with a 20-year-old native lover, Phuong.  His life is disrupted by the arrival of the impossibly innocent American Alden Pyle, a member of the American Legation.  Pyle is almost a caricature of a Saidian Orientalist: having read about “the East” before his arrival there, he is incapable of experiencing it as anything other than his reading has conditioned him for.  The rest of the story spins out from Pyle’s unalterable single-mindedness, with typically bittersweet Greene-ish fatalism.

There is something about Greene’s fiction, what I know of it, that reminds me of Elizabeth Bowen.  It is not only their contemporaneity, I don’t think.  They both evoke place extremely well.  Indeed, this is one of the elements that so strongly drew me in: the description of a time and place entirely unknown to me (I’m not proud to admit that I hadn’t known there’d been a French war in Vietnam in the 50s), rendered so indelibly.  There is a shared confidence in characterisation, too.  That confidence is here manifested in Vigot, a tremendously interesting character (a Pascal-quoting policeman nursing private sorrows; Fowler more than once says of him that he ought really to have been a priest) who is given really only a few pages.  Greene makes the most of him in what space he does give him, but I find it impressive that he didn’t try to shoe-horn him in a bit more.  I think I would have done in his place.  Fowler, especially, is a real tour de force, a force all the more special for being sustained so well for the length of the novel.  He is a cynic who is not tiresome, whose cynicism rings true as hard-won experience rather than sour grapes: a rare thing to pull off.

Greene also shares with Bowen a saving talent for humour in their plots of great philosophical import.  This manifests itself, like Bowen, in humdinging one-liners, many of which, appropriately for this novel, are about innocence (“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”, or, more succinctly, “Innocence is a kind of insanity”) but it also includes a fantastic joke at the end in which Cheddar Gorge is made equivalent to the Grand Canyon.  And it’s short!  Short but incredibly deep, a real experience.  But of course Greene has form — The Third Man is one of my favourite films (and he’s also inspired a brilliant pop song by John Cale).  I may be brewing an obsession with him.