The Quiet American, by Graham Greene

Perhaps you have heard of this excellent 1955 novel. You are likelier to have seen a film version – the one from 1958 starring Michael Redgrave and Audie Murphy, or the 2002 remake with Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser. But if you have not read the book, you may be acquainted with plot and characters without perceiving the depths, which are the source of the book’s power. 

Vietnam, 1952-55. Thomas Fowler is a cynical and weary middle-aged English journalist living in Saigon, reporting on uprisings against the French colonial grip. Into his life comes Alden Pyle, the quiet American of the title. His attitudes are bookish and moral and clear-cut. In Pyle’s world there are no shadows. But Vietnam is all gray. He falls for Phuong, the young woman who keeps company with Fowler. He wants to save her, to elevate her from her life in Saigon. Because he is young, when he offers to marry her, Phuong sees better prospects, and agrees. Fowler, who depends on her, strives to recapture the equilibrium of the indifferent – Pyle has got under his skin. Fowler would marry her himself, except that his estranged wife in London refuses to divorce him. 

The plot is not the point. Pyle is murdered, and Fowler has his own reasons for being involved. Besides an undercurrent of rivalry, Fowler loathes Pyle’s methods, the young American’s clear conscience while he busies himself building up the Third Force which will usher in Democracy over the heads of the Communists and dictators. A bomb going off in a crowded square at the hour when the place is most crowded with women and children is simply an error of timing – the parade in which a few colonels would be blown up, was called off. Fowler is there, seeing the young mother holding her dead baby, the trishaw driver whose legs were blown off. Pyle arrives, complaining of the blood on his shoes and shrugging off maiming and death as an ancillary cost of his great cause. 

Greene developed a degree of cynicism over a career spent in places where his privileges as a white Englishman set him apart – alienate him – without grounding him in faith nor honesty. He regards himself as a fraud, and thus recognizes it in those around him. Greene is thereby able to present us both Thomas Fowler, who stands in for his own views, and Alden Pyle, who despite his strait-laced awkwardness, eschewing booze and prostitutes, wields death as the tool put into his hands by those who sent him to Vietnam. He does not apologize: he believes in it, just as American officers would say a decade later, “It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.” 

When Fowler makes a trip north and rides along on a French bombing run, he witnesses the pilot making a “vertical raid” in which he dives the plane thousands of feet, strafing and bombing as he goes, repeats the maneuver a dozen times, then as they return to the airstrip, blows a sampan out of the water because his instructions are to shoot anything on the river. That evening at an opium house, he addresses Fowler’s appalled reaction: 

“You are a journalist. You know better than I do that we can’t win. You know the road to Hanoi is cut and mined every night… But we are professionals: we have to go on fighting till the politicians tell us to stop. Probably they will get together and agree to the same peace that we could have had at the beginning, making nonsense of all these years.” His ugly face which had winked at me before the dive wore a kind of professional brutality like a Christmas mask from which a child’s eyes peer through the holes in the paper. “You would not understand the nonsense, Fowler. You are not one of us.” 

Where the film versions fall short is in their inability to convey Greene’s masterful writing. Here is Fowler’s first impression of Pyle, in a café in Saigon: “Perhaps only ten days ago he had been walking back across the Common in Boston, his arms full of books he had been reading in advance on the Far East and the problems of China. He didn’t even hear what I said; he was absorbed already in the dilemmas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West; he was determined – I learnt that very soon – to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world. Well, he was in his element now with the whole universe to improve.” 

Greene tells the story in reverse: almost the first thing we learn is that Pyle has been found murdered where he should not have ventured. Perhaps this is the novelist’s riposte to Pyle’s certainty – to start with his death, then explore what little of his life he spends in Vietnam, showing us what he might have learned and ultimately does not. Meanwhile, Fowler, his foil, tries to open the young idealist’s eyes. Fowler can’t hate him for taking Phuong – the Englishman already knows too much about impermanence – and can’t love him for saving his life during a Viet Minh attack in a rice paddy – he would have preferred just to die. But when Pyle accepts that the road to Democracy is necessarily paved with the innocent dead, that Fowler cannot ignore. Greene’s warning booms down the decades – have we learned anything? Can we? The Quiet American is as timely today as when it was written nearly seventy years ago.

The Forsyte Saga, by John Galsworthy

Every winter I read a big thick book. This year I chose The Forsyte Saga, which is actually three novels, linked by two short interludes.  The first volume, The Man of Property, was published in 1906, and the final book, To Let, in 1922. The saga is the history of an upper middle class English family whose older generation’s births spanned 1799 to 1820. These ten siblings, a selection of their children, and theirs, are the characters, in scenes set from around 1890 through the early 1920s.

“[Forsytes] are...half England, and the better half too, the safe half, the three percent half, the half that counts. It’s their wealth and security that makes everything possible; makes your art possible, makes literature, science, even religion, possible. Without Forsytes, who believe in none of these things, but turn them all to use, where should we be? My dear sir, the Forsytes are the middlemen, the commercials, the pillars of society, the corner-stones of convention; everything that is admirable.”

In The Man of Property, Soames Forsyte is the epitome of the breed: quiet, snobbish, cold, proper, self-disciplined, possessive. Therein lies the tale. In his youth he meets a beautiful young woman, Irene, and determines to make her his wife. Through persistence he succeeds - but then she realizes she does not love him. To him, she is his most shining possession. To her, he is a jailer - the sumptuousness of her prison means nothing to her.

Irene meets a Forsyte cousin’s fiance, an architect, with whom attraction is immediate and profound. Soames engages the young man to design a house for him, and Bosinney, in consultation with Irene, builds the expensive lovely house, Robin Hill, in a bucolic spot not far from London. But Bosinney and Irene fall in love. He breaks his engagement, she breaks her marriage vows, he dies in an accident and she shuns Soames, who, repulsed by the thought of publicity, does nothing. They live separately, without communication, still married.

The first interlude follows: Indian Summer of a Forsyte, about the last years of Old Jolyon, Soames’s uncle. A great connoisseur of beauty, he buys Robin Hill, a purchase which at the time suits Soames, who hates the house but averts a scandal by not having to advertise it. Old Jolyon provides Irene money to live on, and wills her a generous stipend. He warms in her presence, and reconciles with his own son Jolyon (whose daughter was the architect’s fiancee) and his two children by his second wife.

Now the second novel, In Chancery, opens (chancery is court - the title refers to Soames assisting his sister in her divorce from her drunken spendthrift husband, and Soames finally pursuing his own divorce from Irene). Jolyon the younger, a watercolorist and also a great appreciator of beauty, is a complete anomaly in that acquisitive family. Eventually this Jolyon finds his way to Irene. Soames, by now older and desirous of an heir, finds her still so beautiful that he entreats her to come back and father a child for him. She repudiates him. At last he presses for divorce, to marry a young Frenchwoman he does not love, who bears him a daughter. In an ironic twist, Irene and Jolyon move to Robin Hill, where they have a son.

So ends the second volume. Now we have the weakest section of the book, the mercifully short Awakening, a treacly flight of fancy in the mind of Irene and Jolyon’s son Jon at age eight or nine.

The final book, To Let, opens with Jon and Fleur, Soames’s daughter, both nineteen, meeting by chance. Their cousin and his wife (first cousins to each other, in one of the durable love matches in the saga) host Jon at their country place, where Fleur comes to visit.  The two young people fall in love. Irene and Soames are both appalled by this liaison - the ugliness of their parting will not allow either to make rapprochement for their children’s sakes.

That’s the bare bones of the story. What makes it fascinating is, on the one hand, Galsworthy’s way of plunging the reader into a time and place foreign to us, but guiding us skillfully. Here’s what the Forsytes think of Bosinney’s death:

“In their hearts they would even feel it an intervention of Providence, of retribution - had not Bosinney endangered their two most priceless possessions, the pocket and the hearth?”

On the other hand, the full tale has the symmetry of a composition by Bach - parents who have no use for each other, children who fall in love. They neither lead their elders to reconciliation, nor go as far as Romeo and Juliet to tragic ends. And we see the importance of beauty and love in society - Jolyon wins Irene by gentleness, and by allowing her whatever freedom she wants. Soames, who clenches onto things and people, estranges his young second wife -

“He knew that she knew that they both knew there was no love between them, but he still expected her not to admit in words or conduct such a thing, and he could never understand what she meant when she talked of the hypocrisy of the English.”

His only concern when she has an affair under his very nose, is its effect on his adored daughter: his daughter, he thinks of Fleur, not theirs.

Lest you think Soames a monster or a buffoon, you should read this trilogy - he is so fully developed and so thoroughly human that to scorn him is to scorn ourselves. The possessiveness that is his undoing is a family trait - he is only the most perfect manifestation of it. What he wants to possess is beauty - in addition to Irene, he amasses a formidable collection of paintings, which he chooses with an eye to resale value but nevertheless appreciates while they are his. When he visits the last member of his father’s generation - Uncle Timothy, now a hundred - he reflects that the house should be a museum, for it is a perfect representation of the bygone Victorian world. Every object, adornment, custom in the house exists in a backwater untouched by anything more recent than the Boer War. Yet Soames perceives that these furnishings that meant so much to his childhood have no value in the modern world.

Copious notes assembled by Geoffrey Harvey in the Oxford World Classics edition (1995) illumine Galsworthy’s references, enriching the story for a modern audience.

Step out of time - immerse yourself in a world better and worse than our own.