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Book review

The Quiet American by Graham Greene, 1955

“After dinner I sat and waited for Pyle in my room over the rue Catinat; he had said “I’ll be with you at latest by ten”, and when midnight struck I couldn’t stay quiet any longer and went down into the street.”

Over the years, in recognition of his reputation as one of England’s greatest novelists, I have read several novels by Graham Greene – Our Man in Havana, Brighton Rock; The End of the Affair; The Third Man; and Dr Fischer of Geneva – with the aim of finding out for myself what entitled him to that status. All are impressive in their own way. Brighton Rock is a chilling portrait of a psychopath; The Third Man is an outstanding detective story, and so on – but none of them have struck me as being anywhere nearly as impressive (while still being very distinctively by Greene) as The Quiet American.

The short (less than 180 pages) novel is set in mid-1950’s Vietnam. At this time the origins of the Vietnam War were developing, with the French colonial rulers struggling to impose order upon a growing Communist insurgency and their American allies slowly being dragged into the conflict. The narrative contains an account of the domino theory which came to dominate American foreign policy for decades. If you are not familiar with this theory it argues that one country ‘lost’ to communism would lead to others in the region falling to communism like a row of toppling dominos.

“They want enough rice, I said. They don’t want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don’t want our white skins around telling them what they want.”

“If Indo-China goes…”

“I know the record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes.”

Narrated in the first person by the cynical and aging English journalist Thomas Fowler, The Quiet American tells the story of a love triangle between Fowler, his much younger Vietnamese mistress Phuong, and a naive American ‘economic attaché’, Alden Pyle. Through this story Greene challenges the American involvement in Vietnam and eerily predicts the future course of the conflict. Greene’s was a war correspondent for The Times and Le Figaro in French Indochina 1951–1954 and the novel is clearly based on this experience, with his point of view being closely identified with his narrator, Fowler. The novel is told in flashback, with Fowler recalling his brief relationship with Pyle before the latter is murdered by insurgents.

It becomes clear very early on in the novel that Pyle is a CIA agent organising support for a local right-wing militia, seen by the American as a useful third force in opposition to the communists.

Fowler has a live-in lover, Phuong, who is only 20 years old and was previously an exotic dancer. Phuong has an ambitious sister who intend to arrange a marriage for Phuong to a Westerner. She originally thought that Fowler might marry Phuong, but he is already married. His wife back in the UK is a staunch Catholic unprepared to consider divorce, despite his record of infidelity. Pyle falls immediately in love with Phuong and asks Fowler to give her up, promising he will give her everything he, Fowler, cannot. At the same time Fowler’s editor asks him to return to England, offering him a promotion. Despite the American offering much more than Fowler can, Phuong chooses to stay with the Englishman. Pyle, always attempting to be ‘honourable’ withdraws and tries to make himself scarce. But he and Fowler are thrown together once again when they end up in a guard tower outside Saigon under attack from the insurgents. Pyle saves Fowler’s life much to his irritation. Back in Saigon, injured but recovering, Fowler lies to Phuong that his wife has agreed to a divorce. When this lie is exposed Phuong moves out an in with Pyle, realising that Fowler is never going to marry her.

The novel’s climax comes when the evidence pointing to Pyle’s involvement in a attack killing civilians becomes undeniable. Pyle attempts to justify his support for General Thé, commander of the ‘third force’ behind these attacks, explaining his theories about what is best for the Vietnamese. As a journalist, Fowler has some trusted contacts with the Viet Minh, predecesors of the Viet Cong, one of whom approach him asking for his tacit help in ending Pyle’s support for General Thé. He realises, but does not admit to himself, that this most likely means Pyle will be murdered. He goes through with the arrangement, and the result is already known. Despite his involvement, even culpability, Fowler manages to be angry at Pyle’s death, telling the American Economic Attache “They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair’s about, and you gave him money and York Harding’s books on the East and said “Go ahead. Win the East for Democracy”.

This was a devastating portrait of American involvement in Vietnam, extraordinarily prescient, predicting the whole course of the war. No wonder the book was seen as anti-American – it certainly isn’t sympathetic to the US. Greene obviously wrote from bitter experience. As a political statement the novel is powerful, but it succeeds on a number of other levels. The description of how women are treated in 1950’s Saigon is depressing. Phuong’s relationship with Fowler is predominantly commercial – he looks after her financially, with the implied promise of future support, and she is return allows him access to her body. She is a step above the prostitutes working the streets of Saigon or at the House of the Five Hundred Girls, shown fighting desperately for ‘business’ – but she is treated little better by the Americans. Granger, the obnoxious journalist working as part of the press corps in Vietnam, asks of Fowler’s relationship with Phuong:

“Where’d he find her? You got to be careful in this town.” He added gloomily “Thank God for penicillin”. Later he describes her as “a piece of tail”, even though it is clear that her relationship with Fowler is more than that of client and prostitute. Fowler’s narration portrays Phuong as docile and interested only in gossip about the British Royal family. He sees other Vietnamese women purely as sex objects:

“Up the street came the lovely flat figures – the white silk trousers, the long tight jackets in pink and mauve patterns slit up the thigh.”

The Quiet American is taut, precise, atmospheric, and chillingly prescient. In Fowler, Greene has created a complex, flawed, and in many ways unpleasant anti-hero with whom the reader cannot help but identify, despite his culpability in Pyle’s murder. Highly recommended.

The Quiet American by Graham Greene, 1955

Aside
Book review

Lost Horizons, by James Hilton, 1933

Hilton’s 1933 novel, Lost Horizons, is in many ways an unconventional adventure story. It is almost completely devoid of action scenes – there’s no fighting with ghastly foreigners; situations in which primitive natives are impressed by the explorers’ gadgets are conspicuous by their absence; there are no encounters with wildlife, traditional or Jurassic. It does admittedly share some DNA with the classic Victorian Lost World adventure story. It opens conventionally for example, with a complex framing device in which a story is told by one traveller to another about a tale they once heard:

“Cigars had burned low, and we were beginning to sample the disillusionment that usually afflicts old school friends who have met again as men and found themselves with less in common than they had believed they had.”

It takes some time before we penetrate these layers and get to the central story, in which four Western travellers, escaping from violent civil unrest in China, are taken by airplane to a secret valley in the Himalayas. Here they discover Shangri-La, a hidden and mysterious community governed by a monastery populated by enigmatic monks. Shangri-La has a secret – there is something about the valley that gives its inhabitants extremely long lives (we never discover what causes this effect, but it only applies to people who come to live in the valley, not the indigenous residents who barely feature).

The novel’s central character and narrator is Conway, an Allan Quartermain-type figure. Conway is a diplomat who is still haunted by his experiences in the First World War:

Twelve years earlier he had grown to hate the perils of trench warfare in France, and had several times avoided death by declining to attempt valorous impossibilities. Even his D.S.O. had been won, not so much by physical courage, as by a certain hardly developed technique of endurance.

Conway is accompanied by his junior envoy, Mallinson, Barnard, an American businessman, and Miss Brinklow, a missionary. Mallinson is keen to return to the outside world, but eventually learns that there is a price to Shangri-La’s gift of long life – once you go there you are never allowed to leave. While the others gradually come to terms with their life sentences, albeit in a very comfortable cage, Mallinson plots his escape, and finally persuades Conway to help him. While we are left to guess at Mallinson’s eventual fate, the last we hear of Conway is that he is trying to return to the remote and inaccessible valley.

Lost Horizons looks back nostalgically to the great adventure novels of the turn of the century when there were believed to be still undiscovered parts of the world. In those novels the focus was Africa or South America, but Hilton sets his story in an even more remote area, the unexplored zone between Nepal, Tibet and China.  

“there came over him, too, as he stared at that superb mountain, a glow of satisfaction that there were such places still left on earth, distant, inaccessible, as yet unhumanized. The icy rampart of the Karakorams was now more striking than ever against the northern sky, which had become mouse-coloured and sinister; the peaks had a chill gleam; utterly majestic and remote, their very namelessness had dignity.

While British explorers and adventurers from Victorian novels would often treat the ‘foreigners’ they meet with contempt, Conway is a much more mature, might I even say liberal, traveller:

Conway had no race or colour prejudice, and it was an affectation for him to pretend, as he sometimes did in clubs and first-class railway carriages, that he set any particular store on the “whiteness” of a lobster-red face under a topee.

A persistent theme in the novel is the idea that Shangri-La will provide a safe haven for the coming global war. The idea that Europe was going to erupt into a war zone was common place at the turn of the century, but Hilton is prescient in his prediction that the same thing was going to happen again, this time on a global scale. Barnard, one of the kidnapped travellers who we eventually find out is a Wall Street financier on the run from the police, wanted for an unspecified financial crime, presumably embezzlement, is happy to stay in hiding because he believes the global economy is close to collapse. The head monk, Perrault, who established the monastery in the late eighteenth century, sees the speed of technological change happening in the world as likely to lead to war on an industrial scale:

“he saw the nations strengthening, not in wisdom, but in vulgar passions and the will to destroy; he saw their machine power multiplying until a single-weaponed man might have matched a whole army of the Grand Monarque. And he perceived that when they had filled the land and sea with ruin, they would take to the air… “But that was not all. He foresaw a time when men, exultant in the technique of homicide, would rage so hotly over the world that every precious thing would be in danger, every book and picture and harmony, every treasure garnered through two millenniums, the small, the delicate, the defenseless —all would be lost”

Perrault describes the coming war as a storm, and is clear that it will be an apocalypse of unprecedented scale and ferocity:

“The storm… this storm you talked of…”

“It will be such a one, my son, as the world has not seen before. There will be no safety by arms, no help from authority, no answer in science. It will rage till every flower of culture is trampled, and all human things are levelled in a vast chaos. Such was my vision when Napoleon was still a name unknown; and I see it now, more clearly with each hour. Do you say I am mistaken?”

Conway answered: “No, I think you may be right. A similar crash came once before, and then there were the Dark Ages lasting five hundred years.”

“The parallel is not quite exact. For those Dark Ages were not really so very dark—they were full of flickering lanterns, and even if the light had gone out of Europe altogether, there were other rays, literally from China to Peru, at which it could have been rekindled. But the Dark Ages that are to come will cover the whole world in a single pall; there will be neither escape nor sanctuary, save such as are too secret to be found or too humble to be noticed. And Shangri-La may hope to be both of these. The airman bearing loads of death to the great cities will not pass our way, and if by chance he should, he may not consider us worth a bomb.”

One inconsistency in the novel troubled me perhaps more than it should. The four travellers were kidnapped and taken to Shangri-La. Why? If people there don’t die for centuries, why the need for an infusion of fresh blood? The population of the valley may have been dwindling but we are told it is regularly topped up by explorers accidentally wandering into or near the valley. Conway and friends don’t bring any much-needed skills or experience and there’s every chance that Mallinson in particular will react violently to his kidnapping and life imprisonment, never to see family and friends again. He certainly doesn’t see Shangri-La as any kind of paradise:

There’s something dark and evil about it. The whole business has been like that, from the beginning—the way we were brought here, without reason at all, by some madman—and the way we’ve been detained since, on one excuse or another. But the most frightful thing of all—to me—is the effect it’s had on you.”

I appreciate I am over-thinking this. This is really a comic-book story in novel form that shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Hilton’s characterisation rest on stereotypes and the central conceit is more than a bit silly. The idea of a lost civilisation hidden from the outside world and containing secret treasures is a key feature of many late Victorian novels as the British empire began to approach the full extent of its reach and people came to realise there probably weren’t many more lost horizons in front of them.

Attitudes to sex in Lost Horizons

There are surprisingly frequent and explicit references to sex in Lost Horizons. Hilton has an interesting approach to this topic. References to sex in the novel are usually tangential and tentative but nevertheless surprisingly frequent and ultimately unambiguous. Traditionally adventure stories would skirt around the issue of sex, usually not mentioning it at all. But in Lost Horizons it is a part of people’s lives, just not one that can be talked about using everyday language. Instead euphemism is the order of the day. Take this example in which the missionary, Miss Brinklow, is discussed. Conway tells us that

“it was to Miss Brinklow that he spoke first. He realized that she was neither young nor pretty —negative virtues, but immensely helpful ones in such difficulties as those in which they might soon find themselves.”

Indirectly phrased this may be, but Conway is clearly saying that Miss Brinklow’s age and lack of attractiveness is going to helpful in the circumstances that they may soon find themselves – in other words that she is less likely to be raped because of her age and looks.

Later there is this exchange between Chang, their mysterious host at the monastery, and Conway, about sexual desire, and whether it can be a source of conflict in Shangri-La:

“Quite often,” replied Chang with a broad smile. “The lamas, of course, are immune, and so are most of us when we reach the riper years, but until then we are as other men, except that I think we can claim to behave more reasonably. And this gives me the opportunity, Mr. Conway, of assuring you that the hospitality of Shangri-La is of a comprehensive kind. Your friend Mr. Barnard has already availed himself of it.”

Conway returned the smile. “Thanks,” he answered dryly. “I’ve no doubt he has, but my own inclinations are not—at the moment—so assertive

How wonderfully euphemistic. ‘The hospitality of Shangri-La is of a comprehensive kind” – which translates as ‘the women in the village are available for sex if your urges become uncontrollable’. Barnard has already been down there getting some; Conway is for the time being under control.

There is more than a hint of homo-eroticism in the relationship between Conway and the much younger and more inexperienced Mallinson:

Conway reached his hand towards Mallinson’s, and the answering grip was hot and eagerly affectionate. Mallinson went on: “I don’t suppose you realize it, but I’ve been terribly alone these last few weeks. Nobody seemed to be caring a damn about the only thing that was really important—Barnard and Miss Brinklow had reasons of a kind, but it was pretty awful when I found YOU against me.”

However, they get a grip on themselves and later on both men compete for the affections of the silent, doll-like Lo-Tsen. Lo-Tsen is a Manchu princess who entered Shangri-la in 1884 as a girl of 18. Although she is now 70 she still looks 18. She is used by Chang and the monks as a way of persuading arrivals to accept their new lives in Shangri-La and we are told she is content in this role, although she is only ever seen through the eyes of other, male characters. Mallinson drops heavy hints that his relationship with her has become physical. When asked by Conway how he knows she will help him escape, he replies:

Mallinson half-turned away, his face lit with a grave shyness. “Because I DO know… Perhaps you’ll think less of me for it… but I DO know. I’m afraid you never properly understood her, Conway. She was cold on the surface, but that was the result of living here—it had frozen all the warmth. But the warmth was there.”

“To be unfrozen?”

“Yes… that would be one way of putting it.”

“And she’s YOUNG, Mallinson—you are so SURE of that?”

Mallinson answered softly: “God, yes—she’s just a girl. I was terribly sorry for her, and we were both attracted, I suppose. I don’t see that it’s anything to be ashamed of.

Again it is not particularly hard to de-code Hilton’s euphemisms – these are really single entendres, in which unfreezing her warmth is unquestionably Mallinson’s way of telling Conway that he has had sex with her, and he follows this certainty up with an assurance that her body is that of a young woman.

Novels of this kind would often be read by children, so to find such frankness about sex and sexuality is unusual. You normally find more carefully coded language to allow room for ambiguity about the nature of characters’ relationships. Here instead hot-blooded Englishmen are expected to have sex with native women and are largely unapologetic about it.

Lost Horizons, by James Hilton, 1933

Aside
Book review

Around the World in Eighty Days, by Jules Verne, 1873

Around the World in Eighty Days charts the adventures of Phileas Fogg and his valet Passepartout as they travel, well, you know what they get up to, and even if you didn’t the novel’s title would probably help you out! Set in the 1870’s, the time of its serial publication, the story takes its inspiration from the recent verneopening of the American transcontinental rail route, which theoretically allowed a journey around the world by land and sea in a time span that in earlier years would have been thought impossible. This is the central concept of the novel, which was obviously original and engaging in its day, although it hasn’t aged well.

Fogg is a caricature of the typically bloodless Englishman (there is a debate about the extent to which Verne established the various features of the Englishman abroad caricature, but that feels like a more academic exercise than I have the appetite for), only interested in his wager and his whist. He largely ignores all the countries he passes through. Passepartout on the other hand is fascinated by all he sees, and gives the reader some interesting insights into the countries they fleetingly visit. The pressures of keeping up to Fogg’s strict timetable give the novel a great pace, but means the countries fly by relentlessly.

I found Fogg’s lack of interest in his journey strangely off-putting – even when he meets an exotic Indian princess and rescues her from a grisly fate he treats her like someone he shares a commute with. Verne defines him largely by negatives:

Certainly an Englishman, it was more doubtful whether Phileas Fogg was a Londoner. He was never seen on ‘Change, nor at the Bank, nor in the counting-rooms of the “City”; no ships ever came into London docks of which he was the owner; he had no public employment; he had never been entered at any of the Inns of Court, either at the Temple, or Lincoln’s Inn, or Gray’s Inn; nor had his voice ever resounded in the Court of Chancery, or in the Exchequer, or the Queen’s Bench, or the Ecclesiastical Courts. He certainly was not a manufacturer; nor was he a merchant or a gentleman farmer. His name was strange to the scientific and learned societies, and he never was known to take part in the sage deliberations of the Royal Institution or the London Institution, the Artisan’s Association, or the Institution of Arts and Sciences.

Fogg is well-named, unremarkable in his appearance and his character. He possesses a self control that is alien to his European assistant and most of the people he meets on his journey. He is described as being:

“about forty years of age, with fine, handsome features, and a tall, well-shaped figure; his hair and whiskers were light, his forehead compact and unwrinkled, his face rather pale, his teeth magnificent. His countenance possessed in the highest degree what physiognomists call “repose in action,” a quality of those who act rather than talk. Calm and phlegmatic, with a clear eye … exactitude personified. … He was so exact that he was never in a hurry, was always ready, and was economical alike of his steps and his motions. He never took one step too many, and always went to his destination by the shortest cut; he made no superfluous gestures, and was never seen to be moved or agitated. He was the most deliberate person in the world, yet always reached his destination at the exact moment.

I am not sure if the reader is supposed to admire or warm to Fogg – we hope he wins his bet, although that’s never in much doubt, even at the close, but his romance with the Indian princess is a matter of supreme indifference.

Passepartout on the other hand is a larger-than-life comic character, constantly getting into schoolboyish ‘scrapes’, although the ease and regularity with which he is extricated from these situations gives the story a lack of authenticity. He introduces himself thus:

“Jean Passepartout, a surname which has clung to me because I have a natural aptness for going out of one business into another. I believe I’m honest, monsieur, but, to be outspoken, I’ve had several trades. I’ve been an itinerant singer, a circus-rider, when I used to vault like Leotard, and dance on a rope like Blondin. Then I got to be a professor of gymnastics, so as to make better use of my talents; and then I was a sergeant fireman at Paris, and assisted at many a big fire. But I quitted France five years ago, and, wishing to taste the sweets of domestic life, took service as a valet here in England.”

Fix, the bumbling policeman pursuing Fogg in the mistaken belief that he is a bank robber, is intended to provide further comedy as well as undermining Fogg’s attempts to keep to time, but we are never under any illusion that the outcome of the wager has been decided long ago. No matter what obstacles Verne throws in the way of the travellers, we always know they are going to waltz right round them and make it to the doorstep of the Reform Club with a minute to spare.

Around the World in Eighty Days is a confident expression of the wonders of the technological innovations of the 19th century and the way they were opening up the world to travellers. Instead of being scared by the inventions and machines (pace Wells) Verne revels in their powers. The novel is a celebration of the European spirit of conquest, exploration and innovation. Obviously we can now see the darker side to that spirit, but Verne sees things only from the perspective of his European characters and is blithely unaware that they are exploiting the people and places they visit. The novel also marks the beginning of long distance travel as something accessible to people other than explorers.  

Although Verne is usually seen as a science-fiction writer, this is a good example of an author writing outside his usual genre. There is a strong emphasis on the events and places in the novel being rooted in the actual, an attempt to make everything feel real and believable – hence for example the obsession with train timetables throughout the book. Now we can circle the globe in hours it all feels a bit quaint and ridiculous, and a wasted opportunity to see the world rather than just rush around it.

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