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:
January 2023; 180 pages
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