The Quiet American
Graham Greene
- 13 minutes read - 2623 wordsAuthor: Graham Greene
Rating: ★★★★
It’s a simple story. You can read it in an afternoon, and it’s bewitching enough that one could easily read it twice over (thus, an afternoon to an evening) to marvel at its circular structure and reveal its staggeringly good use of foreshadowing and symbolism.
Beginning in media res, we learn from a world-weary English reporter, Thomas Fowler, who is covering Indochina escaping her colonial yoke to France, that an American, Alden Pyle, has died, assassinated, over the bridge to Dakow. The principal audience for this fact (besides us) is his Vietnamese mistress, Phuong, who had recently left him to take up residence with the late Pyle. While the murder and the love triangle would seem to provide Fowler with motive, he seems to lack means or opportunity and thus Greene leaves us asking: “How did Pyle die?” But to answer this question, Greene, and thus Fowler, begin by telling us how Pyle lived.
The plotting of this book is masterful: no action is wasted, no paragraph fails to serve a purpose. The men’s plans for Phuong mirror the West’s plan for Vietnam. In discussing how to love her (and who would do so better, or more honorably), they discuss how to steward a colonial holding; in blundering in their assessments of Vietnam, they miss who she is and what she’s capable of.
In this regard, the book, reviled at the time of its publishing for being Anti-American as the (ostensibly) “Pro-American” forces began the long folly of digging boot heels and graves into the mud of Vietnam, tells the story of all the follies to bring “enlightened democracy” to other countries. Reading this book in the wake of American efforts to drag Afghanistan to democracy, in passages, ran my blood cold:
We [English] go and invade the country: the local tribes support us: we are victorious: but like you Americans we weren’t colonialists in those days. Oh no, we made peace with the king and we handed him back to his province and left our allies to be crucified and sawn in two. They were innocent. They thought we’d stay. But we were liberals and didn’t want a bad conscience.
To quote Lennon & McCartney: I read the news today, oh boy
The officials said the Taliban had been combing through records at the ministry of defense and interior and the headquarters of Afghanistan’s spy service, drawing up lists of operatives to search for. And there are more and more reports that the militants are exacting swift and fatal revenge when they are found. Source Plus ça change as they say in France. Fowler prophesies:
I’d bet … that in five hundred years there may be no New York or London, but they’ll be growing paddy in these fields, they’ll be carrying their produce to market on long poles wearing their pointed hats. The small boys will be sitting on the buffaloes.
While the subject matter and the construction are superb, Greene’s facility with dialogue makes for terse, punchy interchanges (usually between Fowler and Pyle) that must have made his works seem like the world’s easiest adaptations to screenplay, e.g.:
“You don’t believe in Him, do you?
“No.”
“Things to me wouldn’t make sense without Him.”
“They don’t make sense to me with him.””
The final movements of Greene’s opus, from an explosion to the last sentence, draw the reader along with an inexorable gravity that accelerates exponentially. In those pages, true intentions are lain bare and the impossibility of teaching sensitivity, awareness, and a healthy respect for humanity’s endemic illnesses doom Pyle, damn Fowler, and sweep Phuong and her homeland into some other countries’ game for someone else’s imagined benefit.
{
"title": "The Quiet American",
"author": "Graham Greene",
"highlightCount": 53,
"noteCount": 1,
"annotations": [
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "This is the patent age of new inventions / For killing bodies, and for saving souls, / All propagated with the best intentions",
"location": 1
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Pyle was very earnest and I had suffered for his lectures on the Far East, which he had known for as many months as I had years.",
"location": 4
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "...he gave way at once, with a single sigh that might have represented his weariness with Saigon, with the heat, or with the whole human condition.",
"location": 8
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "She had attached herself to youth and hope and seriousness and now they had failed her more than age and despair.",
"location": 10
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "'God save us always,' I said, 'from the innocent and the good.'",
"location": 10
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "There was no scene, no tears, just throught--the long private thought of somebody who has to alter a whole course of life.",
"location": 14
}, {
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Pyle was quiet, he seemed modest, sometimes that first day I had to learn forward to catch what he was saying. And he was very, very serious.",
"location": 15
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Perhaps I should have seen that fanatic gleam, the quick response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth Column, Third Force, Seventh Day. I might have saved all of us a lot of trouble, even Pyle, if I had realized the direction of that indefatigable young brain.",
"location": 17
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action--even an opinion is a kind of action.",
"location": 17
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Tucked away behind the anthology there was a paper-backed book called The Physiology of Marriage. Perhaps he was studying sex, as he had studied the East, on paper. And the keyword was marriage. Pyle believed in being involved.",
"location": 21
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{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Suddenly I was angry; I was tired of the whole pack of them with their private stores of Coca-Cola...[t]hey killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about and you gave him money and York Harding's books on the East and said, \"Go ahead. Win the East for Democracy.\"",
"location": 23
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace.",
"location": 36
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "I too took my eyes away; we didn't want to be reminded of how little we counted, how quickly, simply and anonymously death came.",
"location": 43
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{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "He was wearing a holy medal round his neck, and I said to myself, 'The juju doesn't work.' There was a gnawed piece of loaf under his body. I thought, 'I hate war.'",
"location": 45
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{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "The possession of a body tonight seemed a very small thing -- perhaps that day I had seen too many bodies which belonged to no one, not even to themselves.",
"location": 45
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{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "He looked up from his bootlaces in an agony of embarrassment. 'I had to tell you--I've fallen in love with Phuong.'",
"location": 49
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "He had in his hand the infinite riches of respectability.",
"location": 50
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.",
"location": 52
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Perhaps that's why men have invented God--a being capable of understanding. Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bam-boozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers",
"location": 52
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "...he was as incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was incapable of conceiving the pain he might cause others. On one occasion--but that was months later--I lost control and thrust his foot into it, into the pain I mean, and I remember how he turned away and looked at his stained shoe in perplexity...",
"location": 53
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Yet he was sincere in his way: it was coincidence that the sacrifices were all paid by others, until that final night under the bridge to Dakow.",
"location": 53
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{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "To him the whole affair would be happier as soon as he didn't feel mean",
"location": 54
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{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "A dollar love had good intentions, a clear conscience, and to Hell with everybody. But my love had no intentions: it knew the future. All one could do was try to make the future less hard, to break the future gently when it came, and even opium had its value there.",
"location": 54,
"annotation": "Wow, this is Afghanistan right now."
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "I was to see many times that look of pain and disappointment touch his eyes and mouth when reality didn't match the romantic ideas he cherished, or when someone he loved or admired dropped below the impossible standard he had set.",
"location": 66
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "I suppose it's all right--but I like to know what I'm eating' He took another munch at his Vit-Health",
"location": 78
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "He was one of the most inefficient liars I have ever known--it was an art he had obviously never practised.",
"location": 79
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "The job of a reporter is to expose and record. I had never in my career discovered the inexplicable...In any vision somewhere you could find the planchette. I had no visions or miracles in my repertoire of memory",
"location": 80
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{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "I laugh at anyone who spends so much time writing about what doesn't exist--mental concepts",
"location": 85
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{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "I'd bet my future harp against your golden crown that in five hundred years there may be no New York or London, but they'll be growing paddy in these fields, they'll be carrying their produce to market on long poles wearing their pointed hats. The small boys will be sitting on the buffaloes.",
"location": 86
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "We go and invade the country: the local tribes support us: we are victorious: but like you Americans we weren't colonialists in those days. Oh no, we made peace with the king and we handed him back to his province and left our allies to be crucified and sawn in two. They were innocent. They thought we'd stay. But we were liberals and didn't want a bad conscience.",
"location": 88
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{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "You don't believe in Him, do you? / No. / Things to me wouldn't make sense without Him. / They don't make sense to me with him.",
"location": 97
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "What a lot of money it costs, I thought as the pain receded, to kill a few human beings---...",
"location": 99
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "One shouldn't fight a war with children and a little curled body in a ditch came back to mind.",
"location": 100
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable of honour--the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two. Perhaps I was no longer in love but I remembered.",
"location": 103
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "If only it were possible to love without injury--fidelity isn't enough.",
"location": 103
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Ordinary life goes on--that has saved many a man's reason. Just as in an air-raid it proved impossible to be frightened all the time, so under the bombardment of routine jobs, of chance encounters, of impersonal anxieties, one lost for hours together the personal fear.",
"location": 112
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "...the long vertical Chinese signs and the bright lights and the crowd of extras led you into the wings, where everything was suddenly so much darker and quieter.",
"location": 115
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Perhaps I had moved too hurriedly and they had heard me, because silence grew outside. Silence like a plant put out tendrils: it seemed to grow under the door and spread its leaves in the room where I stood.",
"location": 122
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "'She can't love you after this.' His ideas were as simple as that.",
"location": 123
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "'I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings. And that applies to your country too, Pyle.'",
"location": 124
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "In the moment of shock there is little pain; pain began about three a.m. when I began to plan the life I had still somehow to live and to remember memories in order somehow to eliminate them. Happy memories ware the worst, and I tried to remember the unhappy. I was practised. 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.",
"location": 137
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "'We all get involved in a moment of emotion and then we cannot get out. War and Love -- they have always been compared.'",
"location": 144
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "Oh, I was right about the facts, but wasn't he right too to be young and mistaken, and wasn't he perhaps a better man for a girl to spend her life with?",
"location": 148
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "But, Pyle, you can't trust men like Thé...We know their kind...[we] old colonialists[;] Go home with Phuong. Forget the Third Force.",
"location": 149
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.",
"location": 150
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "'Blood,' I said. 'Haven't you ever seen it before?' / He said, 'I must get them [shoes] cleaned before I see the minister.'",
"location": 154
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "This is the hour when the place is always full of women and children--it's the shopping hour. Why choose that of all hours?",
"location": 154
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "'What's the good? he'll always be innocent, you can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.'",
"location": 155
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance",
"location": 155
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "A two-hundred-pound bomb does not discriminate. How many dead colonels justify a child's or a trishaw driver's death when you are building a national democratic front",
"location": 155
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "'Sooner or later...one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.",
"location": 166
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "'Are you sure? sometimes we have a kind of love for our enemies and sometimes we feel hate for our friends.'",
"location": 168
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "I handed back the decision to that Somebody in whom I didn't believe: You can intervene if You want to: a telegram on his desk: a message from the Minister. You cannot exist unles you have the power to alter the future.",
"location": 172
},
{
"type": "Highlight",
"highlight": "I had become as engagé as Pyle, and it seemed to me that no decision would ever bee simple again.",
"location": 175
}
]
}