Destination: Vietnam
Book: The Quiet American by Graham Greene
(I need to add a P.S. –although it’s at the beginning, not the end, so make that Pre-Script.) In thinking about what I wrote here, and watching the video above, I suddenly realized that the movie of The Quiet American was probably what instilled in me a strong desire to travel to Vietnam. So there you have it. A travel book/movie.
What struck me as uncanny about The Quiet American was how much the book foretold the next decade when the Americans were in Vietnam. I had seen the 2002 movie with Michael Caine playing the cynical British war correspondent, but even though it came AFTER the war, I still missed the way that American behavior aped the failed attitudes of the French. Not that I accept Greene’s arguments.
The beautiful Vietnamese girl, Phuong, says little and reveals nothing about her true feelings–a perfect symbol for the inscrutable Vietnam that neither the French, the British nor the Americans can understand. Fowler, the Brit, willingly deals with the communists to get rid of his rival, Pyle.
A 1956 review of the book in the New York Times puts some of Greene’s political thinking in perspective. “He had visited the Communist territories and been much impressed by the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh.” they say.
In reading anything by Greene, you have to get past his obsession with Roman Catholicism. The protagonist will inevitably be a non-believer who is closely related to a believer and is plagued with guilt over whatever…in this case infidelity. In this case he is pitted against an impossibly gullible American (the experienced and knowing British empire against the naive America).
And from the point of view of religion, what are we to make of the fact that the guileless, optimistic young American loses out to the cynical, opium-smoking Fowler? Perhaps who wins in life doesn’t count. It is only the afterlife that matters?
Meanwhile, philosophy and politics aside, Greene tells a good story with romance and adventure and crisp dialogue. It belongs in the travelers library for the light it casts on a Vietnam that is mostly, but not entirely in the past.
