The Quiet American - Graham Greene

It's faintly disturbing to come across a book written in the year I was born, about then contemporary events, that seems so up to date today, sixty-three years later.

Graham Greene, as usual, knew what he was talking about. He had reported on the early stages of the Vietnam conflict and had encountered the early stages of US involvement. That is the setting here. Thomas Fowler is an ageing (in the 1950s he would have been downright elderly) reporter for a major London newspaper. He has been happily covering the conflict from Saigon for several years. It suits him because his high Anglican wife back in England won't divorce him and out East he can live with his twenty year-old girlfriend Phoung and his opium pipe. Unluckily he meets the rawest of new boys, young WASP Alden Pyle, who claims to be working for medical aid but who is clearly a 'diplomat' as they used to be called, or spy as we call them now. He supports America's policy of a third way in Vietnam (basically replace French domination with American). Pyle is a devotee of the US thinker York Harding. Harding is fictional but reflects a trend of the time. Fowler elucidates: Harding was a foreign correspondent rather than a frontline reporter; his work is all opinion with no factual underpinning. The irony is, Fowler's secure life is now threatened because his paper wants him back in London as their foreign correspondent.


Fowler and Pyle become unlikely friends. Thus Pyle encounters Phoung and falls in love. Unlike Fowler he is single and plans to take Phoung home with him. Fowler cannot do that if he returns to London and his wife still won't divorce him. So he doesn't stand in the way when Pyle takes Phoung from him. But then Pyle is found dead in the river. Inevitably Inspector Vigot suspects Fowler. Vigot and Fowler are old friends, which makes things awkward.


It could easily be a murder-mystery but it's not, albeit the story does rely on an unexpected twist in the tale. Instead it is a novel of clashing attitudes and beliefs - a strong philosophical basis brought to life by the deft characterisation of the handful of main characters. The other stroke of genius is the time structure. We start with the discovery of Pyle's body, then recover the events that preceded it. A lesser hand would have either gone back to the beginning and continued in the past or alternated, but Greene was at the peak of his powers in 1955. He flips back and forth between present and recent past - the investigation unfolds for the reader at the same time as s/he discovers the relationships between the characters and their motives. It really is brilliantly done.


For me, the only drawback was the purely journalistic stuff, the local colour. The problem here arises because in 1955 Greene could have no idea of the horrors that full American involvement would bring in the Sixties. In 1955 Vietnam was largely unknown to the English-speaking world and was very backwards under its French masters. Therefore Greene had to explain it and show how primitive it was in parts. However for those of us born in 1955 we all know about Vietnam (or we think we do - how many of us truly know that the US took over a pre-existing war and turned a war for freedom into civil war?), thus the 'native' sections were very dull for me. On the other hand, it is unmistakably, inarguably anti-American, which makes it irresistible in the time of Trump.

Ginger, You're Barmy - David Lodge

This is a reissue of Lodge's 1962 novel based on his own National Service. The point, as in fiction by many other reluctant recruits, is that National Service was pointless and boring. Problem is, pointless and boring doesn't make for winning fiction.  Lodge gets round this by cleverly compressing the action into the beginning and end of his avatar Jonathan's two-year stint. Everything between, he implies, is the boring stuff we don't need to bother with.

He freely admits to borrowing the device from Graham Greene's The Quiet American. Indeed, his 1982 afterword is, for once, useful and informative.  By 'for once' I don't mean to slight Lodge but to scorn the practice of publishers who tend to think that they have to add something extra to reissued novels for the benefit, presumably, of the hard of thinking. Anyway, in this instance it does add value.

Rather than make himself the rebellious character - another typical problem of the sub-genre - Lodge's Jonathan is the pragmatic one who gets on with it and makes the best of a bad job.  The rebel here is the ginger Irishman, Mike Brady, who is simply one of nature's nonconformists.  Brady goes completely off the rails when the bullying victim that always exists in any bunch of confined young men, dies.  He attacks the bully and pays the price.  He thus leaves the novel about two-thirds of the way through.  Big problem, we might assume, leaving us with the boring plodder Jonathan Browne.  Even as a fledgling author, however, Lodge had the skills to stave off disaster.  We already know that he is courting Brady's girlfriend - another benefit of the flashback structure - so our interest now centres on how this came to be.  Is he really making his narrator a bit of a shit?  No he isn't, and the courtship is touchingly handled.  Then, towards the end, Brady naturally resurfaces, now a member of a quite different army.

Ginger is, of course, a proper English comic novel.  Which is not say it is funny or - as the guff on the cover seems to suggest, farcical - but simply that it views its world and those who inhabit with good humour and general positivity.  There are smiles rather than laughs.  Lodge is too good at characterisation to waste time on jokes.  The book is lean - two hundred or so pages - yet there is considerable depth and disquisition. Interestingly, it is Lodge's only first-person narration (at least it was in 1982).  He seems to suggest this is a weakness but I consider it a great blessing.  The beauty of a narrator is that you have no choice but to enter his or her world because it's the only one on offer.  You don't have to like him but you can't be allowed to loathe him.  Mike Brady, without Jonathan's explanation of his shortcomings, might be insufferable.  As it is, we share Jonathan's fascination with him.

I have read of lot of Lodge over the years.  On the whole I prefer his early work.  I thoroughly enjoyed this.