The Quiet American--Book Review (reprise)

I think it’s fair to say that most Americans of my generation were introduced to the English novelist Graham Greene by way of a film, The Third Man, about which Wikipedia—whatever did we do without it?—has this to say:

The Third Man is a 1949 British film noir, directed by Carol Reed and starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles and Trevor Howard. It is particularly remembered for its atmospheric cinematography, performances, and unique musical score. The screenplay was written by novelist Graham Greene, who subsequently published the novella of the same name (which he had originally written as a preparation for the screenplay). Anton Karas wrote and performed the score, which used only the zither; its title music, “The Third Man Theme,” topped the international music charts in 1950. It is often ranked among the greatest films of all time.

One can quibble with the Wikipedia write-up—I am inclined to think that the Vienna sewers are the real star of The Third Man—but there’s no doubt that it is an unforgettable movie, and it was an important literary event to the extent that it led to wider appreciation of the oeuvre of Mr. Greene.

In my case, The Third Man led to The Power and the Glory, which I read in college, and finally, just last year, to The Quiet American. The Quiet American is set in Indochina during the early 1950s, when the Vietnamese were trying mightily to throw off the yoke of French imperialism. They succeeded, finally, in 1954, with the victory of the Viet Minh over the French at Dien Bien Phu. The Viet Minh were aligned with international communism, but there were a number of other movements competing with them for the honor of taking Vietnam back from the French. These groups included the Hoa Haos, a Buddhist movement; the Caodaists, an oddball religious grouping; the Binh Xuyen, an independent militia; and various freelancers and gangsters, such as the character whom Greene calls General Thé. In the context of the Cold War and the United Nations’ “police action” in Korea, there seemed to be a great deal at stake in Indochina during the early 1950s. That’s why there was so much covert action there on the part of foreign governments, including the United States.

There are three main characters in The Quiet American. Thomas Fowler is a worldly British journalist who is separated from his English wife, whose Catholicism would seem to render a legal divorce impossible. Fowler, a cynical and perhaps corrupt man who appears to have “gone bush,” manages to console himself with a beautiful young woman named Phuong (whom he can never marry so long as his wife refuses to file for divorce), and a serious opium habit. The third character, Alden Pyle, is a young American—a Harvard man—whose mission in Viet Nam, we eventually are made to understand, involves terrorist bombings undertaken in the name of freedom and democracy. Pyle and his masters, whoever they may be—probably the CIA—believe that it’s in the best interest of the United States to nurture indigenous liberation movements (so long as they are anti-communist) in all parts of what we now call the Third World.

The adjective “quiet” appears many times in many contexts in Greene’s novel, and while the title of the book may be, as the critic Robert Stone puts it, “a joke” (since Alden Pyle is a “prattling fool"), there may be a kind of rough justice in the fact that Pyle’s indiscretion contributes to his own demise--never mind that Fowler earns an assist. The Englishman's impatience with Pyle looks like pure anti-Americanism alloyed with the perception that innocence of any kind is dangerous in the real world. The lesson of The Quiet Americanis that idealists have an uncanny knack for wreaking havoc not only on themselves but upon everyone in their general vicinity. Fowler’s problem is that his motives inevitably will be questioned by all who know--and that would include the French provincial police--that Pyle was his rival for the affections of the same woman: Phuong.

This 21st-century reader of The Quiet American was struck by two things. First, the book makes such a strong and persuasive case against intervention in Vietnam that it seems incredible—more so now even than it did at the time—that the U.S. was willing blithely to wade into the same Vietnamese morass--guns, ideals, and naïveté blazing. The second is that American innocence lingered long aferwards,long enough to inspire our more recent adventure in Iraq, where regime change unfolded in just about the way that Greene would have predicted. It’s hard to believe that any policy could have been better calculated to enhance Iran’s geopolitical fortunes in the Persian Gulf.

Finally, it occurs to me that The Quiet American may do a better job of arguing against America’s permanent war on terror than other sources I have used in past WAIP seminars. I am thinking hard about that as as I put the finishing touches on the syllabus for autumn, 2013.