Quiet American · Feb 21, 07:56 AM

“Sooner or later, one has to take sides if one is to remain human,” Graham Greene writes in his novel, The Quiet American.

After a bowl of Raisin Bran I perused the four towering book shelves, packed with novels, biographies, books on swimming, gardening, and cooking. And a novel about a journalist in Saigon, Vietnam in 1955 leapt into my hands. One of my tutors in England was friend’s with Graham Greene and I think I said I liked his work or at least I told myself I said it and I’d never read anything he wrote so I gave it a chance (eight years later). It was a good choice.

“Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why we invented god, a being capable of understanding. Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bamboozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers."

That quotation is from Fowler. He’s the main character who is in love-ish with Phuong, a young Vietnamese girl. Fowler is British. A young American named Pyle comes into the picture, he’s the quiet one, and professes his love of Phuong to Fowler.

Here’s what Fowler has to say about Pyle, “What’s the good? He’ll always be innocent, you can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.”

I haven’t seen the film, but the book isn’t action packed. Fowler’s opium haze doesn’t only slow things down for him. The theme of choice colors the story though and it’s hard to walk away from this one without thinking of one’s excuses for one’s own incontinence.

— Albin

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