The Quiet American

The Quiet American is a 1955 novel by Graham Greene. It was something I had long intended to read, and in Venice a few months ago I found the novel in a hostel. However, I was reading another book and didn’t finish in time to swap it. Later, travelling through Eastern Europe I was reading books by Paul Theroux, and he often makes reference to Greene, so my interested grew further. Last week, I saw the book was on Kindle and downloaded it. I was not disappointed.

The book is set in Vietnam during the final years of French colonialism. The events in the book could be described as allegorical, I suppose, although they are partially prophetic. They concern three main characters: Thomas Fowler, a British journalist; Alden Pyle, the “quiet American” who appears to be working for the US government, and perhaps the OSS; and Phuong, a Vietnamese woman whom both men love.

The book is told in the first person perspective by Fowler, who is a cynical old man – although I don’t recall his age ever being given. He is separated from his English wife and living with his Vietnamese girlfriend, but his wife won’t divorce him. When Pyle arrives, Fowler takes a strong dislike to him, and that dislike grows as Pyle announces he is in love with Phuong.

Pyle is pleasant, education, and naïve. He has read a great deal about Indo-China (mostly by an author called York Harding), but he has no real experience. Despite this, he assumes he knows what’s best for the region, and is engaged in attempting to find a “third force” to run Vietnam once they have kicked out the French. He represents the American attitude towards the post-colonial world: that between colonialism and communism there must be some third option. While this is logical, the ill-formed American causes death and pain, just like his country would do in the decades following this book.

The book is based upon Greene’s own experiences in Indo-China during that period, and apparently based upon a conversation with an American much like Pyle. The insights into colonial era governances and post-colonial American attitudes are fascinating, but I was particularly taken by his perspective on war. Fowler is against the war, yet trapped in it. There are countless poignant lines about death in the book, and some excellent, vivid scenes portraying the horrors of war. One that stuck with me was:

·         …we didn’t want to be reminded of how little we counted, how quickly, simply and anonymously death came.

He also describes the normality of life against the backdrop of war with beautiful little details:

·         … it seemed impossible to me that I could ever have a life again, away from the rue Gambetta and the rue Catinat, the flat taste of vermouth cassis, the homely click of dice, and the gunfire travelling like a clock-hand around the horizon.

Finally, although one gets the feeling that the characters exist more as allegorical constructs than anything else, at least Fowler’s feelings come across as real. When Phuong leaves him for Pyle, he says:

·         I began to plan the life I had still somehow to live and to remember the memories in order somehow to eliminate them. Happy memories are the worst, and I tried to remember the unhappy. I was practiced. I had lived all this before. I knew I could do what was necessary, but I was so much older – I felt I had little energy left to reconstruct.

I will look out more books by Graham Greene…

Kim, by Rudyard Kipling

I haven't been reviewing much here lately. Since getting back from holiday last month the main reading that I've done has been for my own next book. I've been reading Allen Ginsberg's letters and journals, as well as other related Beat Generation books. My own book will be about Ginsberg's travels, and one of his most famous journeys was to India. On his way there, he read Rudyard Kipling's classic, Kim. I decided to get myself a cheap Kindle version and give it a read.

Kim is the story of a young boy whose parents - Irish immigrants to India - died when he was young, leaving him to be raised on the streets of Lahore. He is a street-smart kid who is neither wholly Irish nor Indian, and can pass for either when he needs.

In the course of the novel, Kim searches for his identity while becoming the chela (helper) of a Tibetan monk on a long quest. Kim finds himself mixed up in the Great Game, which was the struggle for influence over Central Asia by Britain and Russia, while crossing India with his monk in search of a mystical river. Kim attends a British school whilst also maintaining his friendships with locals, and studying Buddhism under his monk.

Most interesting is that the book is a vivid portrayal of life in India during the nineteenth century. The vast and diverse land is explored in extraordinary detail along with its disparate cultures. 

Burmese Days, by George Orwell

Ok. This one is a cheat review – the book I read was a paperback; not a Kindle title. But it couldn’t be helped. I generally read while I travel, and I travel with a Kindle. Last week, however, I did some shopping in Chiang Mai’s incredible little backstreet bookstores, and so I’ll be reviewing at least a half dozen paperback titles in the coming weeks.

First up is George Orwell’s Burmese Days. I was attracted to this not because of its author but rather its title. Although I am of course a fan of Orwell’s work, I’m in Southeast Asia at the moment and I’ve always had a fondness for old stories from this part of the world. The very mention of Burma, the British colony, is guaranteed to intrigue me. Not that I am an apologist for colonialism; I just find it a fascinating time in history.

Orwell lived briefly in Burma, where he developed a healthy hatred for the British colonial system. This experience inspired his novel, about a man named Flory in a town called Kyauktada. Here we see the colonial Brits in all their awfulness – racist, gin-soaked society men and women, lording it over the “natives.” The plot largely revolves around the Club where these Brits get drunk and complain about “the niggers.” They are utterly contemptible, including our hero, Flory, although his somewhat progressive views about race put him morally above the rest of the English characters.  Flory’s love interest is the utterly loathsome Elizabeth – a hateful, shallow, anti-intellectual young woman who’s in Burma to find a husband.

No one in the book except, perhaps, Dr Veraswami, is without some major flaw. Dr Veraswami is Flory’s friend, a “native” who is the target of a hate campaign throughout the novel by local magistrate. Orwell’s disdain for corruption and manipulation, which would be evident in his more famous later works, is clear in Burmese Days, whose characters seek only from self-interest, caring little for the consequences of their actions.

Burmese Days is a wonderful attack upon colonialism and a very enjoyable novel. Despite taking the perspective of a cynical man in a hateful regime, Orwell’s love for Burma comes through in his vivid description of the place and the culture, at a time when it was suffering brutally from British rule.

The Dark Forest, by Liu Cixin

Last year I was on a Chinese novel kick and read Liu Cixin's (or Cixin Liu, depending on how you want to Anglicize his name) The Three-Body Problem. Whilst not exactly the greatest work of literature, it was very enjoyable. I'm honestly not a science-fiction guy, and I didn't really expect to like it, but it was good. The story barreled along, and I very much enjoyed the fact that Liu really knows physics, making the ideas unique and plausible.


This year, while travelling around Africa (see my other blog for info about the trip), I read the second book in what was Liu's trilogy. The Dark Forest leaves off more or less from where the first book ended, with the Earth stunned by the news that it will be invaded by an alien power in 400 years.

"Four hundred years?!" you may well ask. "That's not exactly moving along at a riveting pace!"

The book covers some of those years, jumping about a bit through the same characters as they engage in hibernation to brace against the passage of time. Primarily we follow Luo Ji, a Wallfacer. Wallfacers are the humans chosen to engage in planning the Earth's defense. Due to the presence of "sophons" on Earth, Trisolaris - the enemy power on its way to the Solar System - is able to monitor human activity but not thought. A few humans are chosen as Wallfacers and granted certain power to secretly plan Earth's resistance.

What's interesting to me is that these books view humanity's future from a very Chinese perspective. Yes, it's a global fight, but when you read books in English, usually the future concern a plucky band of white men... In this case, most - but not all - of the characters are Chinese, and the world's language is a hybrid of Chinese and English.

I also like that Liu is very well-versed in science and makes very detailed and plausible guesses about technology in the future. These are all pretty believable and make it easy to engage with the book as it passes through time.

However, as with the first book, Liu's new one falls down in regards characterization. The characters are all pretty flat and predictable. Some of them seem to be carbon copies of cliches from old movies. His dialogue is dull, too. The women in the book largely exist to be beautiful, while the men go out and solve problems. It makes the book rather frustrating. Some of this might be down to translation - and not just translation of language, but the culture wrapped up in it.

Altogether, the first book in this series was, despite some flaws, a very good book that I highly recommended. The second not so much. I'll give the third a shot when it comes out this summer, but I'm not hugely enthusiastic.