‘God save us always,’ I said, ‘from the innocent and the good.’
(The Quiet American, page 20)
Page for page I think this is the most effective of Greene’s books (up to this point in his career). The plot is taut and neat, the Catholic theologising which mars his other books is kept to a minimum – but it is the writing, the precision and accuracy and evocativeness of the words and sentences and paragraphs on page after page, which make this the Greene novel I’d most recommend to people who’d never read one.
Backdrop
Vietnam, 1952. Colonial masters, the French, are struggling to contain the campaign by Ho Chi Minh’s communist army to expel them. There are organised attacks on outlying regions accompanied by terrorist attacks (hand grenades, bombings) in the major cities, Hanoi and Saigon. It’s a complicated situation, though, because there are numerous smaller armies with their own nationalist or religious causes. Already there are several hundred US ‘advisors’ in the country, managing the in-flow of arms and other resources, ostensibly to help the French, but also pursuing their own agenda of seeking to build up a ‘third force’, a nationalist political force which will kick out the French, establish independence, but reject and defeat the communists.
In Saigon, the small world of journalists, diplomats, advisers and so on all know each other, drink together, exchange gossip and bitch about each other. The main characters are:
- Thomas Fowler, a cynical British journalist, an old Vietnam hand who knows all about opium, brothels, the etiquette of Vietnamese society, and the complexity of the political situation. A confirmed atheist, he’s separated from his religious wife back in England and has a Vietnamese mistress, Phuong, who would like his wife to divorce him, so she can become the second Mrs Fowler! The story is narrated by this fallible, biased source.
- Alden Pyle, a young, fresh-faced, crew-cut, idealistic, virginal Boston American who joins the US ‘Economic Mission’ but everyone knows he’s got additional, ‘secret’, responsibilities.
- Phuong, beautiful Vietnamese woman who has become Fowler’s mistress, prepares his opium pipes, creates domestic and order and peace around him.
Plot
Pyle’s arrival starts the plot. His naiveté is contrasted with the crudeness and vulgarity of the other American correspondents and military men, who drink heavily, insult the natives, visit the brothels and boast about it. Pyle stands out from the first for being that rare thing, a quiet American. He is on a naive mission to ‘save’ the world. He has read books about south-east Asia and democracy. A troupe of them get drunk and go to an industrial-scale brothel where the other Yanks get laid but Pyle’s new England Puritanism is appalled. He is enchanted by Fowler’s mistress and high-mindedly determines to save her from this married, drunk Brit, marry her and take her home.
Fowler goes visiting different parts of the scattered ‘front’ against the Viet Minh and (slightly improbably) Pyle turns up in both places. This enables dialogues where Pyle everso decently announces he is going to take Phuong off Fowler and ‘do the decent thing by her’, and Fowler and Pyle to act out their roles of cynical old hand and innocent idealist.
Flashback
As with the End of The Affair there is a sophisticated use of a multi-layered timeframe. Essentially, the story is told in flashback and so we know within a few pages of the start that Pyle is dead. Briefly, Fowler is enraged on a personal level by Pyle’s guileless theft of his mistress, and his innocent expectation that Fowler will continue to be friends with him.
But in the last 40 pages or so we see the practical impact Pyle’s idealism is starting to have. One of his contacts in the Vietnamese/Chinese underworld is almost certainly a communist sympathiser and he shows Fowler barrels full of a sort of plastic flour substance and moulds. Soon afterwards bombs shaped like bicycle pumps on bicycles around Saigon explode, injuring passersby. Fowler realises that Pyle is working to create a ‘third force’ in Vietnam. Fowler argues directly with Pyle that the chosen man, one General Thé, is just a bandit with a few thousand followers, but for Pyle – indoctrinated by his Harvard courses and idealistic lecturers – he can be the leader who saves South-East Asia for Democracy.
Things come to a head when Fowler notices people leaving a bar he’s in, looking at their watches and muttering about ‘time to leave’, then, minutes later, a massive car bomb goes off in a main Saigon square. As Fowler stumbles through the debris, noting the man blown in half and the baby ripped to pieces, he (very conveniently) bumps into Pyle, who is also shocked and muttering that this wasn’t supposed to happen, the bomb was meant to hit a big military parade and discredit the communists, with a view to rallying support for his General Thé. Fowler is outraged. It’s one thing being an idealistic young puppy; it’s another conniving with terrorists to blow up women and children.
So that when he meets his probably-communist contact a few days later, he falls in with their suggestion that he lure Pyle to a restaurant right on the edge of the Secure Zone. With all kinds of misgivings and reeking of bad faith and almost not going through with it – Fowler does go through with it, invites Pyle to dinner, Pyle never shows at the restaurant, and his body is found the next day.
The (tired, jaded) French police sniff around Fowler a little but then give up. They’re as relieved as Fowler to have Pyle out of the way. Phuong returns to Fowler. And the novel ends as he opens a telegram from his wife saying she is relenting and granting him a divorce. He has everything he wants. Why, then, does he feel so wretched? (Because he’s a Graham Greene hero, silly.)
Anti-American
No wonder this novel got so many American reviewers’ and journalists’ backs up. It is really a hymn to how ill-conceived, ignorant and harmful naive American do-goodism is in a world far more complex than their culture prepares them for. In some interviews and letters Greene explained that one purpose of The Heart of The Matter was to show how destructive an emotion pity is. In that book it destroys one man – the main character, Scobie. This novel expands the scope to show how unintentionally destructive an entire foreign policy (American foreign policy) can become which is based on an idealistic and unrealistic sense of pity, a naive wish ‘to help’, ungrounded by experience.
Beyond the character of Pyle himself, the other Yanks, as a group, are described as loud-mouthed, drunk, vulgar, tremendously rude and crude. They are epitomised by the figure of Granger, the drunk, boastful foreign correspondent who files fire-breathing reports without actually going to the scenes of any events, delights in embarrassing the authorities at press conferences, is always drinking and boasting in bars, and on the look-out for women, whores, ‘tail’.
Throughout the text the narrator loses no opportunity not only to criticise the American characters in front of him but almost every aspect of American life. He particularly dislikes their gadget culture, the fridges and air conditioning, the cellophane-wrapped food. Pyle is pilloried for eating his vacuum-sealed Vit-health sandwiches at a restaurant when everyone else is eating the local dishes.
There is also, of course, an undercurrent of rivalry between the sinking Imperial power, Britain, and rising new superpower, America.
Is confidence based on rates of exchange? We used to speak of sterling qualities. Have we got now to talk about a dollar love? A dollar love, of course, would include marriage and Junior and Mother’s Day, even though later it might include Reno or the Virgin Islands or wherever they go nowadays for their divorces. A dollar love had good intentions, a clear conscience, and to hell with everybody. (Penguin paperback edition, p.63)
Terrific scenes
As with all Greene’s novels, The Quiet American is divided very precisely into books (four in this instance) which are sub-divided into chapters which are sub-divided into scenes. It is interesting to speculate whether the experience of writing and helping to produce a stage play (The Living Room, 1953) resulted in the taut feel to all the scenes in this novel and the precision, the pithiness, the effectiveness of the dialogue.
- Scenes: Fowler goes to the village of Phat Diem, and then beyond it to a scattering of farmhouses where he joins a French patrol, crossing canals full of dead bodies. Later, he visits Tanyin for the religious festival, then gets caught in an army watchtower when his car runs out of gas, as night falls and the Viet Minh sneak closer. In a third gripping episode, Fowler is taken out on a ‘vertical bombing’ mission ie in a French plane which repeatedly bombs a village in the north. Norman Sherry’s biography of Greene confirms that all three scenes are based on Greene’s actual experiences reporting for Life magazine. They are terrifically described.
- Dialogue Snappy and pithy. In earlier novels characters are wont to make long speeches. Here they genuinely converse. An indication of this is the appearance of Wit. Fowler is consistently sarcastic, making rude, impertinent and sly comments in reply to the Americans’ crudities or Pyle’s naivety or, sometimes, to the French police enquiries. There is more back-chat. You can imagine it translating easily into movie dialogue.
Religion and relationships
Alas, religion rears its ugly head. Fowler’s wife back in England is a High Church Anglican, as he explains to an uncomprehending Phuong, which explains why she refuses to grant him a divorce (until right at the end). Fowler basks in guilt at having deserted his wife for one mistress, and then deserting her for Phuong in Vietnam. Norman Sherry’s biography recounts in great detail how Greene abandoned his wife of 18 years to live with his mistress in London during the Blitz, before dumping her in favour of the Great Love of his Life around 1948. I.e. the dynamic of Fowler’s fictional relationships exactly mirrors Greene’s own situation and the sense, and sometimes the phrasing, of these sections of the novel closely echo Greene’s actual letters, diary entries and so on quoted in the biography. It is all heavily recycled from his own life.
I read the words in these sections, and registered the precision with which they convey a morass of misery but, after reading the biography, I personally am sick of Greene’s shabby love life and the endless excuses he makes for his behaviour, to himself and everyone around him. Therefore this aspect – the relationship aspect – of the novel made no impact on me.
- First and foremost it is a marvellous evocation of the tragic country of Vietnam at a specific historical moment, along with the sights and sounds and smells of its cities and countryside.
- Second, it is a fascinating and prophetic document of what 1950s anti-Americanism sounds like, what arguments and sarcasms and sneers it used to make its case.
- Third, it is a slightly creaking thriller-style plot – bombs, spies, assassination – but infinitely more plausible and crafted than any of the popular ‘entertainments’ he’d written up to this point.
- Fourth, there is a steady flow of platitudes and verbiage about wives and lovers and mistresses and love and sex and why do we make the ones we love so unhappy, and so on, which I skimmed.
- Lastly, despite making an obvious attempt to write a non-Catholic novel (after the orgies of Catholic guilt which are The Heart of The Matter and The End of The Affair) Greene can’t help slipping in quite a few references to God, ‘do you believe, no I’m not a believer, and yet I found myself praying to something I don’t believe in’ etc. which are irrelevant to the plot and so the reader can take or leave according to taste.
The movie
Showing that Greene’s stories still have relevance, the book was made into a 2002 movie, directed by Phillip Noyce and starring Michael Caine, Brendan Fraser, and Do Thi Hai Yen. As all films do, this one simplifies and exaggerates the text, but in doing so makes a number of themes clearer.
The third force led by its General Thé is much more obvious: they have a military parade through Saigon (not in the novel), Fowler interviews a testy General Thé (not in the novel), Fowler sees General Thé himself in the warehouse where the explosive components are being stored (not in the novel). These changes make the movie conform to standard thriller stereotypes – making the baddies much more obvious and sinister. General Thé could come from a Die Hard or Bond movie.
Similarly, the script makes Pyle’s role bigger and simpler: Fowler realises that Pyle is actually in charge of the operation to build up the third force and, in a key confrontation, directly blames Pyle for the deaths in the car bombs and Pyle, in reply, is clearer than his counterpart in the book about the need to stop and contain communism in Vietnam, to use the people you’ve got to hand, and that’s why the Americans have to get in bed with Thé.
The film also brings out more clearly that everything revolves around Fowler’s decision to betray Pyle to what he knows is a certain death. In the novel lots of other scenes are more interesting and better written. The movie strips those away to focus on the moments when Fowler makes the decision, inviting Pyle to a dinner date he’ll never make, showing us Fowler’s face as he signals to the communist agent out in the square that the deal has been done, closing in on Michael Caine’s eyes as he makes a decision he knows he’ll have to live with for the rest of his life.
Credit
‘The Unquiet American’ by Graham Greene was published by William Heinemann in 1955. Page references are to the 1985 Penguin paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.
Related link
Vietnam reviews
- Dispatches by Michael Herr (1977)
- Tim Page’s Nam (1983)
- The Vietnam War by Mitchell Hall (2000)
- The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam by Martin Windrow (2004)
- Embers of War by Frederik Logevall (2012)
Books & Boots 