"The Quiet American" by Graham Greene

It starts with the death of Pyle, the 'quiet' American attached, with 'special' duties, to the American Embassy in Vietnam (the book is set during the first stage of the Vietnamese war of independence, shortly after the end of the Second World War, when the Vietminh were fighting against the returning colonial rulers, the French, who were receiving  covert military assistance from the Americans). Pyle is innocent in the sense of ignorant, new to the country, his head filled with theories about freedom and the need to resist communism. The narrator is Fowler, a cynical, war-weary British journalist, who sees his role as that of the objective reporter, who feels it is wrong to get involved in the conflicts of others, but who has become involved with a Vietnamese girl called Phuong. There is a love triangle. And when Fowler sees the consequences of Pyle's innocent involvement, Fowler, from whatever motivation, has to become involved.

The backdrop is the horrors of war.

The story is perfectly constructed. It's not a long novel and one has the feeling that every word counts. The juxtaposition of the morally flawed Fowler against the 'good' Pyle and the truly innocent Phuong is perfect. There's even a French policeman who has all the characteristics of Porfiry Petrovich, the wonderful investigator in Crime and Punishment (or, to some extent, Nikov in my novel The Kids of God). Step by step, Fowler explains how Pyle came to his death, and at the same time we understand the pressures on Fowler that forced him to do the things he did.

And there's also some stunning descriptions, such as this one: 

"He would have to learn for himself the real background that held you as a smell does: the gold of the rice-fields under a flat late sun: the fishers' fragile cranes hovering over the fields like mosquitoes: the cups of tea on an old abbot's platform, with his bed and his commercial calendars, his buckets and broken cups and the junk of a lifetime washed up around his chair: the mollusc hats of the girls repairing the road where a mine had burst: the gold and the young green and the bright dresses of the south, and in the north the deep browns and the black clothes and the circle of enemy mountains and the drone of planes." (1.2.1)

It is a beautifully written book. Many people see it as Greene's masterpiece, though I would argue for The Power and the Glory. 

Selected quotes:

• "'Phuong', I said - which means Phoenix, but nothing nowadays is fabulous and nothing rises from its ashes." (1.1) Fowler's disillusion is established from the start.
• "An unmistakable young and unused face flung at us like a dart." (1.1) Innocence can be a weapon in this spot-on metaphor
• "God save us always ... from the innocent and the good." (1.1)
• "There is nothing picturesque in treachery and distrust." (1.1)
• "They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and silly and he got involved." (1.2.2)
• "Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever." (1.3.2)
• "The canal was full of bodies. I am reminded now of an Irish stew containing too much meat." (1.4.1)
• "We didn't want to be reminded of how little we counted, how quickly, simply and anonymously death came." (1.4.1)
• "So much of the war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn't seem worth starting even a train of thought." (1.4.1)
• "The possession of a body tonight seemed a very small thing - perhaps that day I had seen too many bodies which belonged to no one, not even to themselves." (1.4.1)
• "He had in his hand the infinite riches of respectability." (1.4.2)
• "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused." (1.4.2)
• "A Chinese of extreme emaciation came into the room. He seemed to take up no room at all: he was like the piece of grease-proof paper that divides the biscuits in a tin." (2.3.2)
• "What distant ancestors had given me this stupid conscience? Surely they were free of it when they raped and killed in their palaeolithic world." (2.3.3)
• "Loneliness lay in my bed and I took loneliness into my arms at night." (3.1.2)

Greene is a superb writer. I must have read almost all of his novels, many of them many years ago. Those reviewed in this blog include:

• Stamboul Train
• The Ministry of Fear
• The Man Within
• A Gun for Sale

January 2023; 180 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque

The classic anti-war novel, published in 1929 and based on the author's experiences in the German Army during the First World War.

There is philosophy, there is eloquence, there is horror, there are purple passages. This might make the diet over-rich were it not for the context of a man in his tight-knit bunch of friends doing incredibly normal things. Thus, for example, the line "We are two men, two minute sparks of life; outside is the night and the circle of death.” (C 5) might sound a little pretentious were it not for the fact that this is in the context of a midnight feast of stolen goose, roasted and devoured, during a bombardment. Remarque can get away with his purple passages because of the ordinariness of the descriptions and the rooting of all that takes place in such mundane and everyday reality. In fact, he does more than 'get away' with it; it is the prosaic but detailed description of ordinariness that makes the philosophy stand out and lends it its unforgettable power. Were it not for lines such as “There is a smell of tar, of summer, and of sweaty feet.” (C 3) he could not write “I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow." (C 11)

This is a book all about contrasts. For example: “One morning two butterflies play in front of our trench. They are brimstone-butterflies, with red spots on their yellow wings. What can they be looking for here? There is not a plant or flower for miles. They settle on the teeth of a skull.” (C 6) He can do this in a single line: “The branches might seem gay and cheerful were not cannon embowered there.” (C 4)

He is eloquent in his bitterness about his teachers who persuaded him and his classmates to enlist. “For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress - to the future. We often made fun of them and played jokes on them, but in our hearts we trusted them. ... But the first death we saw shattered this ... The first bombardments showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces. While they continued to write and talk, we saw the wounded and dying.” (C 1) But he accepts that you can’t do anything about that. “Where would the world be if one brought every man to book?” (C 1)

This bitterness extends to initial training. “We learnt that a bright button is weightier than four volumes of Schopenhauer. ... With our young awakened eyes we saw that the classical conception of the Fatherland held by our teachers resolved itself here into a renunciation of personality such as one would not ask of the meanest servants ... We were to be trained for heroism as though we were circus-ponies.” (C 1)

He feels that he has been ruined by the war. He wonders what he can do now, a young man whose college years were spent in killing men. "Through the years our business has been killing; - it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?” (C 11) And can he even live? “Now if we go back we will be weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope. We will not be able to find our way any more.” (C 12)

He is bitter against politicians. "I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another." (C 11) He has a solution: “Kropp proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out among themselves. Whoever survives, his country wins.” (C 3)

This is an eloquent condemnation of warfare.

Other great lines:

• “The poor brave wretches, who are so terrified that they dare not cry out loudly, but with battered chests, with torn bellies, arms and legs only whimper softly for their mothers and cease as soon as one looks at them.” (C 6)
• “Between five and ten recruits fall to every old hand.” (C 6)
• “We were never very demonstrative in our family; poor folk who toil and are full of acres are not so. It is not their way to protest what they already know.” (C 7)
• “What is leave? - A pause that only makes everything after it so much worse.” (C 7)
• “Even a soldier’s behind likes to sit soft.” (C 10)

June 2019; 191 pages.

Another powerful book about the war in the trenches is At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop

Other books by German authors reviewed in this blog.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God