The Quiet American by Graham Greene

What to read when the world’s spinning out of control and seems doomed and even your sourdough starter has turned up its toes, leaving only a clear, pink liquid floating above what was once a thriving organism? I’d been meaning to dive into Graham Greene for ages. I’d only read a couple of his novels many years ago and the time felt right. I nabbed a copy of The Quiet American – and woke up in 1950s Saigon with the troubled, jaded Thomas Fowler. Even the air in my Melbourne bedroom felt different – heady with sandalwood and heavy with the prospect of rain.

The first person narrator,  Fowler understands the IndoChina war – he’s reported on if for the past five years. He lives with Phuong, a beautiful young woman who keeps herself emotionally distant from Fowler despite having been his companion for the past five years. Enter Pyle,  ‘the quiet American’ who immediately falls in love with Phuong and brashly hopes to take the woman over from Fowler, in a move akin to colonisation. It will all be for Phuong’s good. She will have security, a future and a mother-in-law who will ease her way into American society. Pyle’s interventionist ideology is contrasted to Fowler’s neutral stance – in matters pertaining to the war and to Phuong:

I didn’t know whether to feel sorry for Phuong or not – she had looked forward so to the skyscrapers and the Statue of Liberty, but she had so little idea of all they would involve, Professor and Mrs Pyle, the women’s lunch clubs; would they teach her Canasta? I thought of her that first night in the Grand Monde, in her white dress, moving so exquisitely on her eighteen-year-old feet, and I thought of her a month ago, bargaining over meat at the butchers’ stalls in the Boulevard de la Somme. Would she like those bright clean little New England where even the celery is wrapped in cellophane? Perhaps she would. I couldn’t tell.

But when Pyle’s interventionist strategies lead to tragedy, Fowler has to shake off his neutrality and declare his position – adding a further layer of moral ambiguity and complexity to an already layered novel.

So pleased to have books like this to escape into when our times seem utterly derailed and our own monsters devoid of ambiguity but simply monstrous.