The Quiet American by Graham Greene

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's a work of moral philosophy which reads like a spy story. It's set in Vietnam when the war was still between the French and Vietnamese Communists. Fowler, a burnt-out British journalist comes into conflict with Pyle, an ideologically-motivated CIA agent as they are both in love with the beautiful Vietnamese girl, Phoung and they both see the war around them in completely different ways. The story is told in flashback; we start with Fowler and Phoung waiting for a visit from Pyle... but he never arrives. (Stop reading here if you don't want to know what happens!)

Fowler refuses to back one side or the other in the war and sees himself as an impartial observer. He uses opium until he doesn't care whether he lives or dies. He has been living for several years with Phoung, but has now been recalled to the UK and doesn't have the backbone to tell her he'll be leaving.

Plye, despite having no direct knowledge of Vietnam, has complete confidence in his book-learned theories that what the situation calls for is a "Third Force" which would fight for democracy against the communist Vietmihn and the colonialist French. He therefore supplies explosives to the opportunistic General The.

When the General's guerrillas use these to attack civilian targets, Fowler is on hand to witness the resulting death and mutilation first hand. Pyle himself is soon at the scene too but views the deaths of innocents as a necessary sacrifice and seems more disturbed b the fact that he has blood on his shoes. This event is too much for Fowler's policy of impartiality. He tells one of his journalistic contacts in the Communist militia that he knows who supplied the explosives and between them they agree that Fowler will invite Pyle out for dinner and the Communists will intercept him and kill him.

Fowler tells himself that his reasons for having Pyle killed was political, and that he simply couldn't allow Pyle to set up further civilian massacres. However, he gets Phoung back as a direct result of Pyle's death and by the end of the book he has secured a divorce from his estranged wife allowing him to bring Phoung back to Britain.

If you have been taking the pretentious pills (or drinking wine) it is possible to see Phoung as a metaphor for Vietnam: She is fought over by two men who don't really understand her (Fowler thinks she's “wonderfully ignorant” because she doesn't know who Hitler is – how much does he know about her country's history? Pyle cannot even speak either of the languages she does!). Fowler has a pragmatic view of their relationship and sees it as a transaction: Phoung needs money, security and a ticket out of Vietnam and he wants a pretty young companion so he doesn't have to face a lonely old age. Pyle has a soft-headed, romantic, chivalrous desire to “rescue” through marriage a woman he can't even communicate with. Phoung herself has almost no character at all as we only see her through their eyes.

I thought that many passages in the book were dramatic irony about the brutality and inefficiency of the American War in Vietnam. But this turned out not to be the case – the book was written in '55 and the Americans didn't join in officially until '59. However, much of the material about the danger of letting naïve Americans who've never been abroad before out to bring democracy to the rest of the world through force of arms is particularly pertinent at the moment with the current situation in Iraq. While I don't side with the racists who believe that Arab countries don't need democracy as they have their “own culture” of gold bath taps for some and dirty drinking water for most, I do think it's something people have to work out for themselves rather than have it brought in by force from outside.

Apparently, the Americans were very offended by this book and its depiction of their national character when it first came out. I'm not sure the British fare any better, though, with Fowler representing us: an opium addicted, murdering snob!