Book Club: The Quiet American

James Cox reviews “The Quiet American” By Graham Greene

Greene's work is a master-class in how to write morality and his 1955 novel “The Quiet American” is a perfect example of this.
His characters display a sense of ethical realism and ambivalent character traits that help to destroy the readers’ sense of good and evil and display both an intimate observation of human interaction and a macro-cosmic epic on a geopolitical scale.
The story takes place in Saigon in the early 1950’s towards the end of the first Indo-China dispute that would escalate into the Vietnam War until 1973.
Protagonist Thomas Fowler is a veteran, English journalist who reports events devoid of opinion or political persuasion. He is Green’s vision of Englishness: logical, calculated, and cynically realistic. Fowler inhabits the kind of purgatory in which Greene thrives. He is at the end of life, and just as he refuses to side with either faction in the war, he too has found a level of comfort in his job and his personal life.
His Vietnamese lover, Phuong, is a purveyor of balance and harmony. She is portrayed sympathetically by Greene as a free spirit who exists unencumbered by any symbolic weight outside of Fowler’s journalistic, narrative ego. She prepares his opium pipes and is an object of desire, but rather than be demoted to a two-dimensional plot device devoid of any personal, or intelligible thought, she emerges as a mystery, a foreign body immersed in a culture neither Fowler, nor Greene, wishes to divulge.

“Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace.”

The equilibrium is destroyed when Fowler becomes acquainted with the eponymous “Quiet American” Alden Pyle who is in the country on an Economic Aid mission, and whose boyish naivety and democratic righteousness represent Greene's own observations of Americans during his time serving in Saigon. Pyle is a fervent advocator of imperialist writer York Harding and his steadfast loyalty to Harding’s writing paints him as a fundamentalist whose idea of establishing Americas democratic structure in Vietnam appear higher on his agenda than establishing peace.
Pyle’s allegiance to Harding’s literature arouses suspicion in Fowler that he may be involved in a mysterious “Third Force” operation through which the U.S. are promoting rebel leader Minh Thé as a potential ruler of Vietnam by initiating devastating bombings which are then used as anti Communist propaganda.
It is this subplot of political deviancy that has earned Greene's novel the label: “prophetic”. By the time “The Quiet American” was published in 1955 Americas “Third Force” had actually installed a puppet dictator in Saigon in the form of brutal leader Ngo Dinh Diem. Indeed, Green had met an enthusiastic member of the Economic Aid mission whilst serving in Saigon who had sermonized the benefits of a Third Force democracy – a character template for Alden Pyle.
In a fantastic example of Greene’s ability to digress between the ‘big picture’ and a much more intimate study of the human condition, Pyle’s political dissidence soon becomes personal when he announces to Fowler that he is in love with Phuong.
This can be seen as Greene’s way of drawing parallels between Pyle’s conduct and America’s overall policies in Vietnam, but I also believe the honest and touching depiction of love, and its different interpretations, are a main narrative focus for Greene, who handles the subject matter sensitively and artistically.
On one hand we have Pyle who has a projected image of Phuong as the ‘Eastern beauty’, his love encapsulated in a romanticised memory of her dancing in a white gown. He sees her through the naïve eyes of a man who has spent very little time in her home nation. He has the money to marry her and satisfy her desire to see America, and this meets to great approval with her over controlling sister.
Fowler, however, loves Phuong as a man at the end of life. Despite living in a time of seemingly endless war, they have found each other and he is reluctant to let her go. His fear of loneliness and Pyle’s colonial intentions highlight “The Quiet American’s” Jungian subtext – that of personal desires and motivations that drive the plot.
Fowler displays a desire to protect Phuong from Pyle’s “idea” of her, realising that with him she will no longer be able to function as a free spirit, but as an American’s trophy.

“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.”

Fowler is unable to marry Phuong as he is still married, and in one heart stopping section, receives a letter in answer to his request for divorce, proving again, that Greene can create suspense on a very personal level, as well as the political and theological issues for which he is usually credited.
Greene converted to Catholicism in 1926 in order to marry, earning him the self-rejected title of “the Catholic novelist”.
By the time of “The Quiet American” the thick ethical boundaries imposed by his Catholic discipline had faded to a grey area of personal motivation, and his struggle with his faith spills onto the page. In Greene we have an adulterer, a man who played Russian roulette as a youth, yet who has earned a legacy as a Catholic thinker. Just as Fowler gravely miscasts Alden Pyle as a Quiet American, the irony of Greene himself screams out here in theological debate:

“If I believed in any God at all, I should still hate the idea of confession. Kneeling in one of your boxes. Exposing myself to another man. You must excuse me, Father, but to me it seems morbid – unmanly even.”

“The Quiet American” is a success on all levels, portraying a touching and astute observation of interpersonal turmoil and love (and the loss of) as well as being chillingly poignant prophecy of America’s imperialistic intentions in Vietnam which will leave potent images of the recent, chaotic events in Afghanistan and Iraq firmly in the readers’ awareness.