A review by jpegben
The Quiet American by Graham Greene

5.0

Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding.

This is a second or even third re-read of The Quiet American and every time I re-read this book I come away with a greater appreciation for Greene's craft and artistry. I won't disguise the fact that this book has become one of my favourite novels. The Quiet American is a masterpiece of the highest calibre not only for its moral complexity, but for its pitch-perfect pacing, structure, and atmosphere. When you read this book, you are transported to the sultry streets of Saigon and Hanoi dotted by barbers with makeshift mirrors, fortune tellers with gnarled hands and wizened faces, and markets abuzz with heat, conversation, and frenetic commercial activity. The Vietnam of today is not Greene's colonial Vietnam, not by a long-shot, but he is still able to capture the essential character of the place: its rhythms, its intense smells and tastes, the languor of its afternoon sun. This is a book that makes you feel the place, what is so beautiful and irresistible about it. And god, Greene's capacity to perfectly draw character in a single sentence is astonishingly rare: "he smiled brightly, neatly, efficiently, a military abbreviation of a smile".

The Quiet American is renowned for its prescience, for prophetically forecasting what would happen as a result of America's ill-fated foray in Vietnam. It can, of course, be read as a stinging rebuke of people drunken on American idealism, encapsulated by Pyle's naive attempts to create a Third Force in Vietnam. The critique of imperial hubris is an essential part of what makes this a great book. Greene brilliantly exposes how naiveté, how people with totalising, impersonal ideas about how the world works or how it ought to work, leave destruction in their wake no matter how benign their intentions are. In his sketch of Alden Pyle, "the quiet American", Greene forces his readers to confront harrowing truths: all too often it is the best of intentions which produce the most catastrophic results. As Fowler (our compromised antagonist), that world-weary, increasingly portly cynic says to Pyle:

'I hope to God you know what you are doing here. Oh I know your motives are good, they always are... I wish you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings. And that applies to your country too.'

Unlike Fowler, Pyle doesn't understand that "human nature isn't black and white but black and grey". Having read this book several times now, I think the visceral core of The Quiet American lies not in specific moral quandaries about the war in Vietnam, but in more general ones about what it means to make moral decisions and be an ethical agent. This is a book about love, vengeance, conflict, and fundamentally ethical ambiguity. Fowler is ultimately the core of this book. Through him, Greene demonstrates how selfish motivations, whether we are conscious of them or not, infuse everything we do. Fowler tries to elide being complicit, becoming involved, but he can't. As he says to himself:

'Sooner or later...one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.'

To Greene, we are all ethically compromised creatures, this is the defining thematic concern of his body of work. And in the extreme conditions of conflict this is amplified one hundredfold. The personal and the political blur. Love and politics cannot be disentangled, particularly given the scantily disguised jealously and desperation both men experience over Phuong, the Vietnamese woman they both love. Personal courage, which Pyle undoubtedly has, is no guarantor of rectitude. While cynicism and cravenness and covetousness, which Fowler appears to have in multitudes, may in the end leave him the man who can stand up and say, on balance, I did the right thing. A cynic like Fowler, a man with such a disillusioned view human nature, seems to champion the cause of life. While Pyle, the idealist, full to the brim with principled abstractions, proves that "innocence is a kind of insanity" which produces heedless destruction. Few books even come close to probing the depths of what moral conduct actually is. Greene, like myself, believes no one is innocent, that not ethical system is perfect, that no matter what we do or how we behave we're all compromised. He also believes, I think correctly, that no matter how fervently we convince ourselves that our decisions are driven by the strictures of logic, there are also other forces at play, subconsciously formulating plans which we aren't even aware of. After all, "there is a prophet as well as a judge in those interior courts where our decisions are made".

The way Greene ends this book is, in a word, with a knockout blow. He sews the seeds of uncertainty, he lets his readers know, in stark, raw terms, that Fowler remains riven with guilty and lingering questions over what he did. He will, it seems, be forever troubled by the niggling question of whether he did the right thing and, more importantly, why he did it. Was it because of genuine moral outage? Did he really see Pyle as a threat to innocents? Or did he see Pyle as a threat to himself and used his threat to innocent life as a way to justify, to rationalise, his own conduct?

Graham Greene you write a killer final paragraph and I really this book is up there with the 20th century greats, it's as good as it gets:

I thought of the first day and Pyle sitting beside me at the Continental, with his eye on the soda-fountain across the way. Everything had gone right with me since he had died, but how I wish there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry.