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…

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.