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. 

The Word For World Is Forest

The novella is a neglected literary form, and Le Guin's The Word for World Is Forest, published in a collection of SF edited by Harlan Ellison, definitely reflects the 1970s and the Vietnam War, as well as Le Guin's other passions, environmentalism and racial/gender politics. While reading it, the obvious comparisons came to mind, with the Ewoks of Star Wars to Avatar, but Philip K. Dick's 1964 novel, Martian Time-Slip, seems like an even better comparison to make. Both writers knew each other and followed each other's work, and much like Dick's earlier novel, a humanoid alien race on another planet must confront colonialism. Of course, Dick's Martian setting more closely resembles the American western than the forest world of Le Guin's novella, but both writers reflect on colonialism, slavery, racism, gender, genocide, and the turbulent decades of US war and intervention in Southeast Asia. 

Unfortunately, where Le Guin lost me is in her extremely didactic moralism (overt references to Vietnam, guerrilla warfare, and massacres of that period abound in the text, with a final message boiling down to violence begets violence?), whereas Dick is a tad more ambiguous and ontologically unstable (although, the question of insanity and the different frames of reference for Terran humans and the native humans of Le Guin's planet regarding dreams indicates some parallels). Another Dick novel of comparable thematic content is Dr. Futurity, especially in postulating a future in which humanity is "mixed race" and Native American (indigenous) spirituality and social organizations are prominent. Sadly, Dick's fiction, from what I've read, did not continue to experiment with these notions of race and gender in the creative ways of Le Guin, hence her stature in science fiction.  

Due to her her father's background in anthropology, the chapters told from the perspective of Selver, the 'god' who leads his race against the Terran settlers, are the most interesting for bringing, in her own way, cosmology and epistemology of indigenous societies to the forefront is fascinating, albeit less engaging than the the larger universe of her Hainish Cycle stories. One finds oneself more interested in the other humanoid aliens, ansible, and League of Worlds, and an extended form of prose writing to bring the world into Le Guin's unique vision. Perhaps if approached as an introduction to the larger world of her Hainish Cycle, some of its flaws can be forgiven.