The Quiet American by Graham Greene

I have a thing for modern Catholic writers: Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, Evelyn Waugh, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Graham Greene. I'll even put Kathleen Norris in the group-- she's an oblate with a Benedictine order. I find their writing true, characters real, and ideas necessary. It's kind of a serious thing that proves CSL's statement: "We read in order to know we're not alone." I'm never alone when reading these people. They are my clan.

Graham Greene makes the most despicable characters spicable. Well, he makes them tolerable if not endearing. His whiskey priest in the Power and the Glory is genius: my post on the Power and the Glory. He has the uncanny ability to make the reader realize that she has a lot in common with this terrible, easily judged character. He blurs the lines between good and evil by calling into question social norms. His "bad guys" are reminescent of the publican praying outside the synagogue. They have the humility to forgo on pretense.

In The Quiet American, Fowler is a small, desperate, weak man, and Pyle is ambitious, naive, and dangerous. With a lesser author, liking both these characters wouldn't be possible. His characters are very believable and he conquers really big ideas... like proxy war and colonialism, and religion. And, his style is highly readable yet artful.

Here's Fowler on war and politics:
"Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and democracy when he gets inside his hut at night?" (119)

"Isms and ocracies. Give me facts. A rubber planter beats his labourer-- all right, I'm against him. He hasn't been instructed to do it by the Minister of the Colonies. In France, I expect he'd beat his wife. I've seen a priest, so poor he hasn't a change of trousers, working fifteen hours a day from hut to hut in a cholera epidemic, eating nothing but rice and salt fish, saying his Mass with an old cup-- a wooden platter. I don't believe in God and yet I'm for that priest. Why don't you call that colonialism?"

".... We haven't a liberal party any more-- liberalism's infected all the other parties. We are all either liberal conservatives or liberal socialists; we all have a good conscience. I'd rather be an exploiter who fights for what he exploits, and dies with it. Look at the history of Burma. (120-1)

Fowler on religion:

" If this cathedral had existed for five centuries instead of two decades, would it have gathered a kind of convincingness with the scratches of feet and the erosion of the weather? Would somebody who was convincible like my wife find here a faith she couldn't find in human beings? And if I had really wanted faith would I have found it in her Norman church? But I had never desired faith. The job of a reporter is to expose and record.... I had no visions or miracles in my repertoire of memory." (110)

"Repertoire of memory": what a brilliant, weighted phrase. The human mind does pick and choose which memories to play.

"It's strange what fear does to a man." (says the priest.)
"It would never do that to me. If I believed in any God at all, I should still hate the idea of confession. Kneeling in one of your boxes. Exposing myself to another man. You must excuse me, Father, but to me it seems morbid-- even unmanly."
"Oh," he said lightly, "I expect you are a good man. I don't suppose you've ever had much to regret." (57)

Oh, the gentle knowing wisdom of the priest.


There's the "love" triangle between Pyle, Fowler, and Fowler's Vietnamese lover, which, of course, mirrors the politics and war. The American's the idealistic ass. Greene is British after all.

This book demonstrates the power of art to raise necessary questions in a fairly inoffensive manner. I think this book is extremely timely considering the American presence in Afghanistan-- are we really helping the Afghanis? Are isms and ocracies a legitimate reason to kill a human being?

This book has made me realize how grateful I am to regain my capacity to read and engage with good books. It was really hard when I didn't have the attention to do it. Three cheers for good books!