The Quiet American

What I love about Graham Greene is his perceptive nature and penchant for being in 'hotspots' before they blow up. Sure, one doesn't have to be a prophet to have foreseen some of the conflicts of the Cold War and colonialism, but Greene's The Quite American shares with Our Man in Havana an intuitive understanding of imminent political and social change. Sure, American intervention in Vietnam long before the Gulf of Tonkin incident was probably predicted by others as early as the mid-1950s, but Greene saw the wasteful Vietnam War in postwar American hegemonic foreign policy, even when masked by American "innocence" (or, perhaps, naivete, as embodied by Pyle). This concern with US foreign policy was self-evident in The Comedians and Our Man in Havana, but this highly cinematic novel littered with references to America's eternal adolescence, articulate this particular postwar British perspective better than The Comedians.

 

 And Vietnam was perhaps the best setting for this shift to decolonisation and US hegemony, especially as the Americans were prepared to ascend as Britain and France lost their empires. This is why Ishiguro's Remains of the Day came to mind while reading this, despite their vast differences in setting and characters. Nonetheless, Ishiguro's novel captured that withering might of the British Empire, whose sun finally began to set, within the metropole. As Robert Stone's explanatory introduction states, Greene came from such a family that was invested in the Empire, and hence the ambivalence on the US and its encroachment in the colonies, or, to be even more direct, Pyle taking away Fowler's "native" woman, Phuong. Naturally, it being Greene, Catholicism is a consistent undercurrent in the novel's portrayal of war, crime, guilt, and redemption, as well as a witty sense of humor and bitter barbs against the US. I loved it all.