Reply #25: IG, is this a good summary of the Quiet American and Third Way? [View All]

That is not the movie I was thinking of, and I did not see it. I feel very uncomfortable with that term now.

http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/169/Quiet%20Americ.htm

"This is an eerily prophetic and, therefore, deeply disturbing book. Ostensibly the story of a love triangle involving a naive American spook, a jaded English journalist and a young Vietnamese girl, lurking just beneath the surface is an allegory for the whole experience of America in Vietnam.

Alden Pyle, the Quiet American of the title, was based on Col. Edward Lansdale, the renowned, or infamous depending on your politics, CIA operative who was sent to Viet Nam in the 50's to subvert the Vietminh after a string of successes in the Phillipines (he was also the model for William Lederer's and Eugene Burdicks "The Ugly American"). Pyle is an innocent who believes that others must surely share his ideals and pureness of motive. He is convinced, based on his adherence to the writings of York Harding, that there is a Third Way for Vietnam, somewhere between Communism and the corrupt colonial government. He has come to Vietnam to foster a group that will adhere to this Third Way. The journalist, Fowler, a cynical world-weary man of much wider experience, realizes that Pyle is a dangerous man because he is imposing his idealized vision on a group that is merely power hungry. Meanwhile, Pyle has fallen in love with Phuong, Fowler's Vietnamese girlfriend. And while Fowler can offer her little because his wife refuses to grant him a divorce, Pyle offers marriage and respectability and a life in America. As Fowler loses Phuong to Pyle and Pyle's group begins a terror campaign, Fowler finally abandons his neutrality and chooses sides, a choice made all the more ambiguous because of his romantic rivalry with Pyle.

The prescient pessimism that pervades this book is it's most interesting feature. Greene, writing well before we really got involved, seemed to sense that Vietnam was a tar baby that we idealistic Americans would not be able to resist embracing. Pyle's bloody blundering seems to presage the well-intended but disastrous mess that we would make of the entire country in the decades to come. One wishes that men like Robert McNamara and the Kennedys had paid attention to this literate warning."

Iraq is our tar baby, I fear.