The Quiet American (book review)

Graham Greene’s The Quiet American was published in 1955. It was a major critical and popular success in Britain. In the United States it provoked outrage. This was Greene’s Vietnam novel.

Thomas Fowler is an English reporter. He insists that he is a reporter, not a journalist. A reporter merely reports. He is not involved. Thomas Fowler does not wish to be involved in anything. He likes Indo-China because he thinks there’s a better chance of dying there than in England.

Alden Pyle is an earnest young American. He’s not one of those noisy Americans. He is a quiet American. Pyle supposedly works for an American Economic Aid Mission although everyone knows that he is an intelligence agent for the CIA. Pyle is the ideal choice for such a mission. He knows nothing whatsoever about Indo-China, or about anything else. But he does know that freedom and democracy are important. He doesn’t know why they are important, but he has no doubts. The French are clearly fighting a losing war to retain their Indo-Chinese colony but if the French lose the communists will take over and freedom and democracy will be threatened. If only there was a Third Force which could be backed by the Americans then freedom and democracy might yet be saved. That is Pyle’s job.

Pyle is an innocent which is why Fowler fears him so much. Fowler knows that Pyle’s meddling is going to get a lot of people killed for nothing but he knows that there is no way to convince Pyle of this.

There is one thing that Fowler does care about – his Vietnamese girlfriend Phuong. And Pyle is likely to be a menace on that front as well.

The novel does not reflect well on the Americans. It also does not reflect well on the French. Or anybody else for that matter.

For this is Greeneland. It’s a world in which failure is not merely inevitable, it is to be welcomed. Thomas Fowler is a typical Greene hero – he longs for death, he longs for oblivion, he believes in nothing. He loves Phuong but he never really believes he can keep her. Love is just another form of betrayal anyway.

But this is not just Greeneland. This is postwar Greeneland. Even in the Thirties Greene saw hope as a foolish illusion. The Second World War rekindled his interest in the world but it did not restore his faith in human nature. And it did not restore his faith in Britain. He was certainly not the only Englishman to experience post-WW2 disillusionment. The difference is that for Greene disillusionment was his natural state of mind so the failures and miseries of postwar Britain came as no surprise. It was simply what he expected.

Thomas Fowler is not just a typical Greene hero, he is a symbol of the new post-war Britain – pessimistic, morally and spiritually adrift, cynical and apathetic. Alden Pyle is the very symbol of postwar America – naïve, ignorant, well-meaning and terrifying dangerous. Pyle is a man with a mission. He’s going to win Vietnam for freedom and democracy. The fact that he understands absolutely nothing about the country or the situation is not going to deter him from his mission. The fact that he might be horribly and disastrously wrong never even enters his mind.

This was the beginning of America’s Vietnam disaster. The disaster was inevitable right from the start. Greene had his faults but he was remarkably clear-sighted about postwar politics. Everything Greene feared, not just in Vietnam but throughout the Third World, eventually came to pass. Innocent illusions were going to lead to a great deal of misery.

Greene was not exactly a cheerful man but he had  sense of humour. There’s a lot of black humour in this book. Greene of course was a Catholic, but perhaps not a very orthodox one. He was also a leftist, but also not a very orthodox one. Greene probably could never have been an orthodox anything. There’s a central conflict in this novel between engagement with the world and non-engagement. Fowler wants to avoid engaging with this world which is probably not healthy. Pyle is very engaged with the world, which is even less healthy.

The Quiet American is a spy story of sorts. It’s a love story of sorts. It’s a mystery story of sorts. It’s a political novel of sorts. It’s a satire, of sorts. Mostly it’s a Graham Greene novel  with all the idiosyncrasies, ambiguities and complexities that that entails. It’s a great book. Highly recommended.