Graham Greene (1) (1904–1991)

I’m not sure if Greene considered this novel one of his “entertainments” but I was entertained. This novel is more than just a Cold War era espionage yarn; it is a novel that deliberately complicates the motives of love and duty by mixing their objects.

Maurice Castle, our main character is a low-level MI6 officer. Much of the novel revolves around Castle’s past and his previous post in apartheid-era South Africa, where he (illegally) fell in love with Sarah, a black South African, show more and consequently ran into trouble with officers of the South African Bureau of State Security (BOSS) with all their deep-seated prejudices and racial animosity. Through Soviet contacts, Castle is surreptitiously able to arrange Sarah’s escape (via Swaziland) and they reunite in England. These events start a snowball of difficult times for the Castle family.

In exploring the difficulties that Maurice and Sarah (and their son Sam) face, Greene explores the ways that duty to and love of country overlaps and conflicts with duty to and love of family. The government that Castle works for demands duty and service and adherence to its political principles, but at a level that is difficult to sustain on professional ethics alone. It is Castle’s love of his colleague, Davis, of field contacts that he has known, and perhaps an ephemeral love of country that keeps Castle dutiful. At the same time, it is his love of family and his affection for his communist contacts who ensured Sarah’s escape from South Africa that creates duties that conflict with Castle’s professional duty and that push him to an inflection point in his career around which the majority of the book revolves.

“The use of his first name was a sign of love-when they were together it was an invitation to love. Endearments-dear and darling- were everyday currency to be employed in company, but a name was strictly private, never to be betrayed to a stranger outside the tribe” (57)

This mixture of love and duty and the infiltration of love and duty into parts of our lives that many of us attempt to keep compartmentalized is deeply troubling and can lead to real mental distress. You may work in a place like this: where a workplace positions itself as “your family,” to which it is implied that you owe some filial duty. Even if this is not you, I’m guessing you can imagine such a scenario. Imagine, further, how those motivations can create conflicts where love of family might mean that you take time off to be at home but this conflicts with love of the organization that wants you to want to spend more time in the office. Imagine also where duty to family means that you deny yourself things in order to contribute to the family’s welfare and then imagine how the same sense of duty to a corporate family could be invoked as an argument to forgo a raise to contribute to the company’s welfare. Now add the complication of political and ethical values and a real mess starts to form.

Greene’s exploration of this stew of personal and professional conflict is very well done, convincing, and clear without being obvious or pedantic. I recommend this one. show less

This doesn't express the infinite weight of living under the tension between autonomy and guilt (which in all Greene's works is how "responsibility" manifests) with the same nuanced, sad patience as some of the author's very best books: The Heart of the Matter or The Power and the Glory, say; that testimonial atmosphere is leavened with the tight allegory and rock-solid plotting that backbeat his "entertainments", and so this is a hybrid creature (as also The Third Man, Brighton Rock), show more drawing its power from its Shakespearean inexorability. It's prescient politically, of course (the CIA in Vietnam during the independence war against the French, perfecting the kind of "third force" "our guys" skulduggery they would pull all over the world in the second half of the twentieth century and that would bear such grim fruit in the twenty-first), and there is a good rate of period and place detail that doesn't usually fall over into exotica (and when it does, like with some of the narrator's observations about the Vietnamese people especially when refracted through Phuong and a gender politics that is both racialized-colonial and prefeminist, its very supersededness helps express the narrator's limits and adds a psychological dimension to the political allegory--and then too also, no doubt only partially at most with Greene's conscious acquiescence, opens the door for an explosive postcolonial recombination, the still here mostly elided perspective of the Vietnamese, who will be the actual victors in the liberation war and who will blow the British–American old hand–young turk structuring dynamic here to smithereens). But basically this is an existential work about "commitment," which for Greene as for Sartre is ultimately the only question, and about the different kinds of monsters it makes of those who embrace it and those who flee from it as long as possible, and how much of our humanity we may salvage under such circumstances, and in what way. Do you like novels that dramatize a moral choice? Then this one will resonate complexly and not with the flatness to which allegory is sometimes prone; if not, not.

(Also, I been drinking vermouth cassis like daily since I read this b, as they did, and so I have it for that to thank.) show less

Note: this review is a rewrite of my original 2011 review, with new comments for 2020 where appropriate.

This book was inspired by Greene’s experience working for MI6 during the Second World War and particularly the story of Agent Garbo, who invented a ring of agents he “controlled” (and, naturally, collected expenses for). On my first read of this book, back in 2011, I had read only a magazine article about Garbo. I have since read Ben Macintyre’s excellent Double Cross, and J. C. show more Masterman’s The Double-Cross System, which I think really added to my enjoyment this time. (“Aha, there’s that comment about the code grouping for the word ‘eunuch’!” I said to myself. Greene thought that was hilarious when he was in the intelligence service and actually found a way to work it into one of his cables.)

Although this is billed by Greene as an “entertainment” rather than a heavy-hitting novel, it is one that is read best at home with a cup of tea. It is very carefully put together, and the comedy is there in spades: the recruitment scene, the reports, the spiralling out of control as British intelligence think their man in Havana is really hot stuff. It is also rewarding to see Wormold develop as a person: he becomes more assured and assertive as he realizes what his priorities in life are.

This book and A Gun for Sale are probably my favourite Greenes. I’d definitely recommend them if you like le Carré, or perhaps as a warmup to le Carré if you are intimidated by the latter. show less

I've become a Graham Greene fan. Never disappointing, always engaging and thought-provoking. Like The Power and the Glory and Our Man in Havana, and others, The Quiet American places a very personal story within a momentous historical setting, finding the questions and the personal struggles the historical setting poses for the lives of ordinary people.

The Quiet American raises questions about the inevitability of taking a stand. There is no such thing as an observer. Sooner or later, merely show more observing is taking a stand, through knowledge and inaction.

It also recalls all the questions about western involvement in the cultures and politics of other countries. Fowler and Pyle, the British and American figures in the book, take different approaches. Fowler is the observer, Pyle the committer. They fall in love with the same woman, with Fowler seeking comfort and pleasure to pass the days while Pyle promises to marry the woman. Fowler professes disinterest in taking sides in the complicated politics of French-occupied Viet Nam. Pyle takes sides. Pyle's actions ultimately compel Fowler to make a choice.

There is certainly an eerie feeling to the book. Although written in 1955 about the French involvement in Viet Nam, it mirrors American involvement in the 60s and 70s. What we learned so much later was apparent to Greene in 1955. Fowler and others move among the native population with the air of being in charge of something, while the divided population carries on their struggles and their resistance invisibly to the westerners, until it's too late for them to do anything about it. The war is recognizably unwinnable for the French, as Fowler remarks and as everyone seems to know, except Pyle and his Harvard-inspired fantasy of a "third force" beyond colonialism and Communism. But the war continues on its own momentum. Viet Nam is itself the "third force" -- it reasserts itself inevitably, no matter what the French do to subdue it, just as it did no matter what we did later. show less