Graham Greene

Review: Loser Takes All

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Loser Takes All, Graham Greene. Penguin Classics (ISBN: 9780140185423) 1993 (first published in 1955).

Summary: On a honeymoon in Monte Carlo, Bertram’s gambling successes force a choice between love and money.

Mr. Bertram is getting married. Neither he nor Cary are affluent. He’s a low level accountant in a business firm, with few aspirations for advancement. But they are excited to share a frugal life with each other, beginning with a modest honeymoon in Bournemouth.

All that changes one day when he is called on to resolve some accounting problems for the firm’s director, Mr. Dreuther. He does so in short order. Bertram mentions his wedding plans and Dreuther insists on what is an enticing alternative. He invites him to go to Monte Carlo to get married, and then join him on his yacht for a sailing honeymoon. How can he and Cary say no to that!

They arrive in Monte Carlo. But there is no Mr. Dreuther. Bertram and Cary marry and enjoy their honeymoon suite. But they had not planned to stay. Bertram visits the casino in hopes of winning enough to afford it. They are living on snacks. At one point, the hotel even fronts him a loan as a member of Dreuther’s firm. He keeps losing until his “system” starts working and he wins enough to pay back the loan. He keeps winning, and at one point gains the balance of controlling shares in his firm from another firm director who has been losing at the tables.

But as he spends all his waking hours gambling or thinking about it, he loses something else. He loses Cary, who loved the hungry and poor Bertram, not this rich stranger. It all comes to a head when Bertram discovers Cary has moved out of their suite to be with a hungry young man she has met during all those days Bertram left her alone.

Then Dreuther shows up, pleading a breakdown to excuse his delay. He finds Bertram alone and hears the sad tale. Instead of counselling him to accept a failed marriage, Dreuther suggests a plan to win Cary back, a plan suggested by the book’s title.

The story is a kind of parable on the saying, “One cannot serve two masters.” In this case, Bertram must choose between love and money, and he chose poorly. Fortunately, we do not have to wait long in this short novel to discover whether Dreuther’s plan will allow him to redeem his poor choice.

___________

Thanks for visiting Bob on Books.  I appreciate that you spent time here. Feel to “look around” – see the tabs at the top of the website, and the right hand column. And use the buttons below to share this post. Blessings! [Adapted from Enough Light, a blog I follow.]

Review: The Lawless Roads

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The Lawless Roads, Graham Greene. Open Road Media (ISBN: 9781504054263) 2018 (first published in 1939).

Summary: Greene’s journey through Mexico to the states of Chiapas and Tabasco where Catholicism was most severely repressed.

Graham Greene is one of my favorite novelists. However, I would not pick him as a travel writer. I have to admit to not looking closely when I purchased The Lawless Roads, only discovering after beginning to read the book, that it was a non-fiction account of Greene’s journey from north to south in Mexico during 1938. His publisher asked him to investigate the anti-Catholic purges in the states of Chiapas and Tabasco.

These began in the 1920’s under Plutarco Elías Calles, President of Mexico from 1924 to 1928 and de facto leader of the country from 1929-1934. Being a Catholic, the publisher thought Greene would have a special connection to the people. As a travel account, it is a dreary read, reflecting the dysfunctional and dangerous character of Mexico in this period. However, the account served as backgroud of perhaps his most acclaimed novel, The Power and the Glory.

He begins at Laredo, then crosses over into northern Mexico, where he succeeds in interviewing General Cedillo, leader of a rebel state. As it turns out, Cedillo is aging and President Cardenas will soon replace him. He then makes his way to Mexico City, describing the life of the city, attending Mass, and meeting the exiled Bishop of Chiapas, “considered “one of the most dangerous and astute of the Mexican bishops.” That visit hardened his determination to reach Las Casas. Then, he travels to Veracruz, on the coast.

From here the journey grows more perilous. He books passage on the Ruiz Cano, little more than a barge, in unbearable heat, with constant rolling motion, and cramped quarters with no sex divisions. Then, he takes another barge from Frontera to Villahermosa, capitol of Tabasco, meets up with a Scottish adventurer, and spends a Sunday with no Mass, comforting himself in a godless state by reading Trollope. Then on to Salto in a small plane, from which he hoped to get a flight to Las Casas. Instead, he settles for a mule trip to Yajalon, with a sketchy guide, from which he hopes to catch a plane. Before departing, he learns of covert mass baptisms by itinerant priests in Yajalon

Finally, when no plane turns up, he embarks on another mule trip across the mountains to Las Casas, braving Arctic chills, changes in elevation, and passing cemeteries of slain Catholics, before finally reaching his destination in time for Holy Week. Masses occur in private homes, hidden services on Good Friday, a visit to the site of miraculous healings on Easter. All the while evidence of the suppression of faith is all about.

By this time, Greene himself is deathly sick with dysentery and we wonder if he will make it back. He does and in an epilogue recounts the journey home. Mass in Chelsea is “curiously fictitious.” He writes:

“[N]o peon knelt with his arms out in the attitude of the cross, no woman dragged herself up the aisle on her knees. It would have seemed shocking, like the Agony itself. We do not mortify ourselves. Perhaps we are in need of violence.”

Greene’s narrative has little plot, only a destination. Apart from the gritty faith of the people, led by courageous priests, there is little to inspire. Crass tourism, corrupt government, risky transport, and endless heat and mosquitoes are recurring themes. Perhaps the most suspenseful part of the account is our uncertainty that Greene will survive. At best, it is an unvarnished account of the aftermath of totalitarian rule.

So this is a tough read. It offers good background for The Power and the Glory. It describes the venality that descends on a nation under totalitarian rule. And it recounts the instances of courage of faith-led resistance. If you are a Greene fan and these reasons are important to you, it is a worthwhile read. Otherwise, you may just find it a slog.

Review: The Man Within

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Cover image for "The Man Within" by Graham Greene

The Man Within, Graham Greene. Open Road Media (ISBN: 9781504054003), 2018 (First published in 1929).

Summary: Francis Andrews flight from smugglers he betrayed endangers a girl with whom he takes refuge.

This is Graham Greene’s first published novel. The main character is Francis Andrews, son of an abusive smuggler. When his father died, Carlyon, his second, took him under his wing in the smuggling business. But he never fits in, no more than he did with his father. Consequently, he writes a letter to customs officers, tipping them off to the smugglers’ whereabouts.. When the customs officers show up, Andrews escapes during the fight that ensues, leaving a customs officer dead.

A group of the men are taken into custody and face murder charges. But Carlyon escapes and is hunting Andrews, his former friend. During a foggy night, Andrews flees across the downs, knowing that if Carlyon finds him, Carlyon will kill him. Desperate, he seeks shelter in a cottage whose only inhabitant is a young woman, Elizabeth. Actually, when he arrives, he finds himself face to face with a corpse, a man who had been Elizabeth’s guardian after her own father died.

Elizabeth shelters him, passing him off as her brother to a nosy cleaning woman. When Andrews tries to leave, he nearly encounters Carlyon on the road and retreats to the cottage. Elizabeth hides him and Carlyon leaves. A bond forms between them. She doesn’t want to be alone. But she also senses the turmoil Andrews struggles with in what seems a cowardly betrayal. She urges him to go to the assizes where the men will be tried, to give his testimony. He does, although he makes a hash of it. Not only is his testimony compromised by the cleaning woman, who identifies him as staying with Elizabeth, who she calls “a loose woman.” He sleeps with another woman, who was a kind of bribe for his testimony. The smugglers are acquitted and Andrews is the object of opprobrium.

Elizabeth is also in jeopardy. Carlyon is on the loose as are the other men. They know she hid Andrews. And this exposes the central thread of the whole story. Andrews struggles with seeing himself as a coward, a legacy of his father’s abuse. He saw betraying the smugglers as a way to strike back, yet betrayal feels the ultimate cowardly act. Now, will he save his own skin, confirming what “the man within” has been saying? Or will he attempt to save Elizabeth? She acted in courage in her love for him. Will he? And what risks and consequences could this mean for them both.

In a sense, Greene offers us two people dealing with a person within, the voices of the dead they are seeking to live free of. Each is bereft when they meet the other, alone in the world. Each faces the question of “is love worth the risk?” In this first published work, Greene gives us characters we come to care for and explores large questions such as the line between cowardice and courage and the risks of love.

Review: A Gun for Sale

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A Gun for Sale, Graham Greene. New York: Open Road Media, 2018 (originally published in 1936).

Summary: A paid assassin murders a foreign minister of war, creating an international crisis that could lead to war but is betrayed by the middleman who paid him, who he pursues even as the police pursue him.

Raven is a paid assassin whose life represents a series of betrayals from being born with a hare lip to finding his mother dead by suicide as a child. Taking lives for hire does not trouble him. And so being hired to kill the Minister for War of Czechoslovakia is just another. He cleans up, killing the overly diligent secretary as well.

Back in England, he discovers that the payment from Mr. Cholmondeley (pronounced “Chumley”) is in stolen notes and police, in the person of detective Jimmy Mather is on his tale. He’s betrayed again by a doctor he asks to operate on the telltale hare lip. His picture is in the papers and serial numbers in the possession of shopkeepers. Betrayed. He has to flee and wants to find Cholmondeley. He spots him on a train to Nottwich, to visit a theatre he supports under the name Davis, using his patronage to pick up women actresses. Anne Crowder, Jimmy Mather’s girl is on the same train, to try out for a part at the theatre.

In short order, Anne escapes attempts of both Raven and Cholmondeley to kill her only to be taken hostage again by Raven as the police, including Mathers, converge on a coal shack where the two are sheltering. A “Stockholm syndrome” type of situation arises as Raven trusts Anne and Anne learns of the plot behind the assassination, to create an international crisis leading to a war that will profit a steel company Cholmondeley/Davis works for. But will Anne survive to tell the story and Raven to exact revenge?

Greene crafts a story at a personal level around trust and betrayal. Raven, as noted, has crafted his life story around betrayal. Anne, the hostage, is in the midst of it. She’s torn between betraying Jimmy and betraying Raven, all to save her life. The story is also about betrayal at a larger level–powerful companies manipulating foreign policy at the cost of many young lives in war (and the expendability of their assassin). Greene includes several scenes showing the vapid social relations among the elite who indulge themselves while preparing to sacrifice young lives. He reminds me of Dwight Eisenhower’s famous and prescient warning about the military-industrial complex.

This was one of Greene’s earlier novels, and in my opinion, not one of his best. Anne’s ability to get into and out of trouble stretches credulity as does the setup that she just happens to be Jimmy Mathers girl. Still, the relationship that forms between Anne and Raven, and the dialogue in the coal shack signals to me what Greene would become as a writer.

Review: The Captain and the Enemy

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The Captain and the Enemy, Graham Greene. New York: Open Road Media, 2018 (orginally published in 1988).

Summary: A boarding school boy is taken to live with a poor woman in a London flat by a confidence man called “The Captain,” who sporadically visits, provides money and seems to care for the woman, Liza, who become’s “Jim’s” mother. Only years later does he understand more about this mysterious figure, and the various relations in his life.

There is much in the setup to this story that stretches plausibility. Victor Baxter, a boarding school student whose distant father is known as “The Devil” is taken out of school one day by a distinguished figure of military bearing, only known as the Captain. That things are not on the up and up becomes clear when, first The Captain asks the boy to lend him what little money he has, and then takes him for an extravagant meal at a hotel, charges it to his room, and then leaves without paying for anything. They are driven to a poorer part of London, to a basement flat, where a poor young woman, Liza lives. The Captain instructs Victor that he is to call her mother and that he will be Jim, and will not be going back to school. He tells Victor/Jim and Liza that he won the boy in a game of backgammon from his father.

The Captain shows up sporadically, always giving Liza assistance, though the source of the money is obscure. Newspaper reports of jewelry thefts mention a figure like The Captain in description, and there are times when he must make himself scarce and times they are not to answer the door to anything but his signal. When he is present, The Captain gives history and geography lessons that suggest wartime escapes and flights. It’s evident that he cares for Liza, that there is some deep bond. “Jim’s” role as he becomes older is to look out for Liza in The Captain’s absence–more prolonged now that he is in Panama. His letters promise wealth around the corner, but again, don’t mention where this will come from.

“The Devil” also shows up and doesn’t challenge the arrangement. It turns out that Liza had been a mistress of his, became pregnant, and a botched abortion resulted in her inability to have children. Through The Captain, one child of the Devil replaces another one lost. The Captain comes off as the noble trickster or confidence man, using deceit to accomplish his idea of the good.

As Jim grows up, he starts working for a newspaper, eventually moving out but staying in touch with Liza. The Captain, now going by Smith, sends money for them to come to Panama. Before she is able, Liza is struck by a car, on an errand Jim once ran. Jim decides to come to Panama, but conceals the truth of Liza’s death. He is met by Quigley, an acquaintance, but not a trusted friend of Smith, who seems very interested in knowing from Jim what the Captain is doing. Jim learns that it has to do with Smith’s plane, which he uses to haul “cargo” for various customers. Remember, this is in the late 1970’s. Jimmy Carter has signed a treaty to turn over the canal to Panama. There are various revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements. Arms are needed, drugs are sold to pay for them. The latter part of the book have to do with the Captain’s efforts, supported by the Panamania government who set a guard on his lodgings, and Mr. Quigley’s real work behind the mask of a financial journalist.

The culmination of the story reveals more of this shadowy figure’s true character, his love for Liza, and Jim’s own relationship with The Captain/Smith. Personally, while I wanted to see how the story would resolve, I felt Greene stretched plausibility and the story didn’t work for me. How schools, family, and social structures let this happen, even after an aunt found out what was going on stretched credulity. I felt this was not up to the level of his great novels of the 1940’s and 1950’s although having the whiff of espionage, of characters who live in the shadows, and yet who love and long for purposeful lives. This one, written toward the end of his life in 1988 (he died in 1991), is for fans who want to read all of his works. I would not base my opinion of Greene on this work but rather ones like Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American, and Our Man in Havana, all written before 1960.

Review: The Ministry of Fear

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The Ministry of Fear, Graham Greene. New York: Open Road Media, 2018 (first published in 1943).

Summary: Just released from a psychiatric hospital for the mercy killing of his wife, Arthur Rowe inadvertently gets caught up in a twisty espionage plot.

It is 1943, the middle of World War 2 in London, with nightly bombing raids and no one knowing if they will live to the next morning. Arthur Rowe lives quietly in a flat, reading and re-reading The Old Curiosity Shop. He’s been exempted from the war effort because he was recently released from a psychiatric facility where he had served a sentence of the mercy killing of his wife.

Inadvertently, he is caught up in an espionage affair, surviving poisoning, escaping another murder charge only to survive a bomb blast when a case, supposedly of books that he is carrying to a hotel rendezvous explodes. He loses his memory, narrowly escapes a sinister psychiatrist, and joins the effort to hunt down the espionage mastermind, the brother of a woman he has fallen in love with, Anna Hilfe. I’ve seen plenty of plot movement and narrow escapes in other Greene novels, but nothing like the madcap adventures of this novel, reminiscent more of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday than anything else I’ve read by Greene.

It begins at a charity fete where Rowe visits a fortune teller who mistakes him for one of the conspirators, that enables him to win a cake in which a role of microfilm has been hidden. He is poisoned, but survives, when he will not give up the cake. After working with a detective, he visits the fortune teller again, and when the lights go out, a man is murdered with a knife carried by Rowe. Knowing he could be charged with murder, he flees, ends up carrying a case of what he thinks are books to a hotel for a man he met at a book seller.

The case explodes, he survives but with the loss of his memory, recovering in a bucolic country psychiatric facility (again!) headed by a soothing but sinister doctor up to no good. He’s visited by Anna Hilfe, who works at the charity that ran the fete, who he’d met earlier and encountered just before the suitcase bomb exploded. He comes to love her, even though he does not remember the prior connection, nor the ways her brother Willi is involved in the espionage plot, ways that become clearer as memory returns and he joins the effort to uncover the ring and retrieve a crucial microfilm.

“The Ministry of Fear” formally is an espionage ring, but becomes more in Greene’s plot. It is the dull reality of the nightly existence of Londeners. For Rowe, it is the fear of being found guilty of a murder he didn’t commit while struggling to justify the one he did. Fear and distrust taints love as both Rowe and Anna know things of the other and of themselves that they dare not reveal. With the catastrophic losses of war and the gray world of espionage, one senses people anxiously clinging to illusions of normalcy in a world gone wrong, and living off balance as a result. It may well be Greene’s snapshot of his times–and a parable for our own.

Review: Orient Express

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Orient Express, Graham Greene. New York: Open Road Media, 2018 (originally published as Stamboul Train in 1932).

Summary: Seven people on a train between Ostend and Constantinople intersect in various ways, making choices about the kind of people they will be.

Seven people on a train from Ostend to Constantinople. Mabel Warren is a hack reporter who drinks too much and is on a routine assignment when she recognizes that Richard John, a school master is actually Dr. Czinner, a dissident returning to his native country to hopefully lead an uprising, the story of Mabel’s career. Warren is accompanied by her assistant who is also her lover, Janet Pardoe, enroute to visit a relative, and secretly hoping for a different life. Myatt is a successful young Jewish businessman, an importer of dates, among other things. Coral Musker is an worn out dancer with a heart condition, attended by Richard John, exposing him as a doctor. When she collapses, she is given Myatt’s berth because she couldn’t afford her own, obligating her in the way women often have been obligated to men, which Myatt doesn’t refuse, even though he is drawn more to Janet Pardoe.

Two others play lesser parts. Mr. Savory is a popular writer, perhaps collecting material and also interested in Janet. Finally, joining them in Vienna is an elusive thief, Josef Grünlich escaping a murder charge when a safe-cracking job went south. Meanwhile, Mabel Warren, victim of another thief in Vienna is not able to reboard the train. Because Czinner refused to compromise his plans to save being exposed, Mabel wires the story to her paper, setting up Czinner’s apprehension. Coral and Josef Grünlich get caught up in it.

What is striking is the contrast between one character shaped by noble ideals and six others who live by looking out for number one. The others have their chances but basically are survivors like the great mass of us. There is also the element of a journey where the constraints of ordinary life, and relational commitments are in flux, particularly evident with Mabel and Janet, and Myatt and Coral.

This is early Graham Greene. It is said he wrote this to make a bit of money. But we can already see one of the characteristic elements of Greene’s work–characters in a liminal place and how they will respond. This lacked the focus and weight of later works, but nevertheless held your interest, wanting to see what the end of the journey held for each.

Review: The End of the Affair

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The End of the Affair, Graham Greene. New York: Open Road Media, 2018 (originally published in 1951).

Summary: A writer struggles to understand why the woman he has had an affair with broke it off, discovering who ultimately came between them.

Maurice Bendrix, a rising writer, encounters Henry Miles, the successful but dull civil servant Bendrix had cuckolded by having a five year affair with Sarah Miles, his attractive wife. The affair, hidden from Henry had ended nearly two years earlier. All that Henry knew (or claimed to know) was that Bendrix had been a great friend. Now he comes to Bendrix with a problem. He is concerned that Sarah may be seeing someone else and wonders about hiring a private detective.

Bendrix discourages this plan, but ends up hiring the detective himself. He’s never understood why Sarah broke off their affair, although at some level, he knows his jealousy of Henry, who she will not leave, had been driving them apart. But they had a powerful love that drew them together. They were parted toward the end of the war when a German V-1 struck the building they were in, leaving him apparently dead underneath some debris. But in fact, he survived. Their affair did not.

Only when the private detective purloins a journal does Bendrix discover the truth. Sarah had found him under the debris, apparently lifeless and made a plea, a promise to God for his life. If he lived, she would not see him again. And the others Sarah was seeing? An atheist and a priest helping her sort out the question of belief. In the end, Bendrix finds out it is not Henry or any of these rivals who came between him and Sarah. It was God. The God he hated who did not exist.

He discovers something else as he reads the journal, and talks with Henry, the atheist, the priest, and the detective. There had been a saintly goodness about Sarah that Bendrix hadn’t seen amid their torrid affair. Even that affair was a longing for passionate love, a love she hadn’t found with Henry. There was more–Henry’s life given back, a disfigurement that disappeared, a sickly child healed. I’m intrigued that Greene includes this “miraculous” element in the story.

We discover that neither Henry Miles nor Maurice Bendrix truly took the measure of Sarah during her life. There was a higher love in her life unsatisfied by being the trophy wife of a civil servant or the possessive passion of Bendrix’s love. The question we are left with is whether Bendrix will respond with love or with hate both to Sarah and Sarah’s God.

Greene, who wrote several novels touching on religious themes raises a searching question: can God call for ultimate love and loyalty? Even when it means the end of the affair? It may be one of the marks of modernity that this is even a question.

Review: Our Man in Havana

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our man in havana

Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene. New York: Open Road Media, 2018 (originally published in 1958).

Summary: A struggling Englishman in 1950’s Cuba is recruited to be a secret agent for MI6 and ends up deceiving the service only to find his fabrications becoming all too real.

James Wormold is a struggling proprietor of a vacuum cleaner business in 1950’s Cuba. His wife has left him and their teenage daughter Milly. He struggles to sell vacuum cleaners named “the Atomic Pile,” a real loser, and come up with enough money to support his daughter’s expensive interests while guarding her against the romantic interests of police Captain Segura, known for his ruthless investigative techniques. At first, this appears to be another one of Graham Greene’s middle-aged men struggling to make some sense of their existence in a far-off foreign land. And it is, with a difference. Comedy. Dark comedy.

Then Hawthorne, an MI6 agent walks into his life and tries to recruit him as an agent. Cuba is a hotbed of competing interests under the Batista regime of the mid-1950’s. Wormold finally realizes that the money he will be paid is the answer to his financial woes. Except he has to become an agent, recruit sub-agents, and send “reports” via code. He confides in his one friend, Dr Hasselbacher, his dilemma and Hasselbacher suggest that he could invent them. He does, a mix of fictional and actual figures who don’t really work for him. He creates reports from newspapers, and sends drawings of an “installation” based on blown up drawings of vacuum parts.

Everyone back at MI6 believes they’ve found a “natural” and his reports create quite a stir. Hawthorne has his doubts, but as the lone doubter in a company of believers, he keeps silent. The do arrange a secretary, Beatrice, to keep an eye on him and his agents. The game appears to be up when a man who has the name of one of his fictional agents turns up dead, and another is shot at. It appears that someone close to him has discovered his “reports” and that the English aren’t the only ones who believe Wormold’s reports. He faces an assassination threat of his own, and has to figure out how to extract himself from Cuba. But first he wants to get a list of agents Segura has, and avenge a murder, leading to a most unusual game of checkers.

Even if he can escape danger from Segura and foreign operatives he (and Beatrice) have to face the music with MI6. All I will say is that the ending is Greene’s “last laugh” at MI6, and all the government experts who are too clever for their own good.

Review: The Quiet American

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the quiet american

The Quiet American, Graham Greene. New York: Open Road Media, 2018 (originally published in 1955).

Summary: A novel set in French-occupied Vietnam paralleling the entangled lives of a British journalist and American agent with the entanglement of war in Vietnam.

Thomas Fowler, a British correspondent in French occupied Vietnam in the early 1950’s, arrives at home one night to find Phuong waiting outside. She reports that American  Alden Pyle has not returned home. She has been living with Pyle, supposedly with an American Economic Mission. Before living with Pyle, she had lived with Fowler. She stays the night, and they learn the next morning that Pyle is dead when they are summoned for questioning by the French Sureté.

Graham Greene then narrates the strange conflicted relationship of these two men who love one woman, and the equally entangled and conflicted relationships of all those who get involved in Vietnam. Fowler wants to believe that he is the uninvolved British journalist, whose country is not a party to the conflict. He has a wife at home from whom he is separated but who will not divorce him. Phuong meets his needs and prepares his opium pipes and she benefits materially from his attention but he can offer nothing more, although holding out the hope of a divorce. Pyle, who loves her at first sight, is unattached and due to come into money becomes a rival, candidly telling Fowler his intentions, and yet strangely taking to Fowler as his best friend, He saves Fowler’s life at one point when they are stranded in enemy territory, and steals Phuong.

Fowler gradually learns that Pyle isn’t all that he seems. He discovers that Pyle is doing something with plastics, that turn out to be plastic explosives, being used to undermine the regime in Saigon. He is actually a CIA agent. Fowler is curious, but remains detached until a bombing of a square intended to break up a parade that is cancelled kills and maims scores of innocents, an act with the fingerprints of Pyle all over it. He faces hard choices of what to do with his knowledge of this “quiet American,” his rival in love, yet one in some ways to whom he is beholden.

Fowler has tried to avoid entangling involvements. A conversation with a French pilot who napalmed villages describes the folly of such an attempt, in both love, and in the Vietnam conflict. When Fowler protests, “That’s why I won’t be involved.” the French pilot replies:

” ‘It’s not a matter of reason or justice. We all get involved in a moment of emotion and then we cannot get out. War and Love–they have always been compared.’ He looked sadly across the dormitory to where the métisse sprawled in her great temporary peace. He said, ‘I would not have it otherwise. There is a girl who was involved by her parents–what is her future when this port falls. France is only half her home…’ “

Greene’s tale was prescient, published in 1955, of the troubling future that would face, first the French, and then the Americans, already present, in Vietnam. Fowler discovered that he, too, was involved with Phuong, with Pyle, and that Vietnam was a far more complicated mistress than any understood. He evades his editors requests to return to London. Love and War has claimed him, as it would many others.

Sadly, this was an instance of prophecy ignored, and it could be argued that there have been others since. We are still in Iraq, and Afghanistan, unable to extricate ourselves from commitments made in “moments of emotion.”  The Quiet American is a cautionary tale as relevant in our times as it was in the mid-1950’s. Hopefully, we will not proceed as heedlessly now as we did then.