Graham Greene's descendants should thank George Bush for the recent royalties associated with this 1955 novel of intrigue and betrayal in Vietnam during the end of the French era, because the he has been bumbling around the world stage like Alden Pyle. You could look at this book as a prescient critique of American foreign policy aspirations, but I'd say that is overselling it by quite a bit.
Alden Pyle, the quiet American in the title, is a naive do-gooder ready to solve the vietnamese problems with equal doses of rhetoric and plastique. His only experience is gleaned from one or two books on the region (two more than Bush used in researching Iraq). The problem is than Alden Pyle is worse than a caricature: he is breathtakingly earnest, forthright, and stupid. No human being is as deaf and dumb as this guy and that undercuts him as somehow symbolic of the US. I mean, he falls in love with some other guy's mistress in the first ten minutes he's known both of them then the next day asks him permission to steal her away. What? Really? No.
I like the book much better emptied of all the applied symbolism. A love triangle, a broken down man, and a new bull in the ring. But the world weary tone has become a cliche--a cynical reporter? check? Personal vice and broken relationships? check. An exotic locale? check. A crooked cop with a weakness for protagonist? check. It is one of those books, where you'd like to travel back in time, so you could spread the book out against the cultural landscape, and understand it with a little more perspective. But it reads like a movie, and has been twice--in 1958, and 2004. What is vietnamese for Casablanca?
If we're going to go the route that Pyle is the US, then Fowler is old Europe and Phuong is everybody caught in the crossfire of both region's brands of colonialism. I think it is only fair to criticize the author for the opaque rendering of Phuong: she barely has feelings, emotions, thoughts. She is a slave, just she might get to choose a master. If anything, the book equally highlights the decadent and dehumanizing attitudes of old world powers that created some the messes we are still trying to clean up today. Like Iraq's ersatz creation as a British Protectorate post WWI.
If we're going to blame Pyle for Vietnam, we should be able to blame Fowler for Iraq.
I like the book much better emptied of all the applied symbolism. A love triangle, a broken down man, and a new bull in the ring. But the world weary tone has become a cliche--a cynical reporter? check? Personal vice and broken relationships? check. An exotic locale? check. A crooked cop with a weakness for protagonist? check. It is one of those books, where you'd like to travel back in time, so you could spread the book out against the cultural landscape, and understand it with a little more perspective. But it reads like a movie, and has been twice--in 1958, and 2004. What is vietnamese for Casablanca?
If we're going to go the route that Pyle is the US, then Fowler is old Europe and Phuong is everybody caught in the crossfire of both region's brands of colonialism. I think it is only fair to criticize the author for the opaque rendering of Phuong: she barely has feelings, emotions, thoughts. She is a slave, just she might get to choose a master. If anything, the book equally highlights the decadent and dehumanizing attitudes of old world powers that created some the messes we are still trying to clean up today. Like Iraq's ersatz creation as a British Protectorate post WWI.
If we're going to blame Pyle for Vietnam, we should be able to blame Fowler for Iraq.
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