What the Quiet American Teaches Us
“I’m not involved… It had been an article of my creed,” Thomas Fowler boasts in The Quiet American, Graham Greene’s magnificent novel of Western embroilment in 1950s Vietnam. Not involved, Fowler insists, in the Indochina conflict; not involved in the murder of young CIA officer Alden Pyle, his romantic rival and sometime friend; not even particularly involved in his own two primary relationships—with wife and mistress. Fowler, a seasoned British journalist stationed in Saigon, takes pride in his neutrality, the only sensible position in a world of imperfect options: the Vietminh, French colonists, Americans, communists, Caodaists, Hoa-Haos. “The human condition being what it was,” Fowler intones, “let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved.” The Quiet American, one might say, is the quintessential cautionary tale against entanglement.
I began to understand Fowler’s creed when I became a spy. In 2004, I volunteered to go to Baghdad as a counterterrorist case officer for the CIA. My mission was to recruit informants who could help track down Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQIZ) leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and dismantle his network. It was my first tour, a plunge into the murk of espionage and the knot of American involvement abroad. Terrorists were battling civilians; Shia were battling Sunni; everyone, it seemed, was battling America and its allies; even Iran had entered the fray. A complex landscape; one might call it, as Greene called Vietnam, a world of too many views.
My fellow intelligence officers and I struggled to identify a well-hidden and poorly defined enemy; to pick terrorists from mere troublemakers, empty threats from real ones, truth from lies. The stakes were high. Soldiers’ lives depended on intelligence we collected. I became acutely aware of the possibility of missteps, of the precariousness, weight, and dangers of involvement.
Seven years after leaving Iraq, no longer a spy, I again landed in the Middle East. This time, in Bahrain, a tiny Persian Gulf island, during the Arab Spring. The Shiite majority was revolting against the Sunni monarchy. Saudi Arabia was backing the Bahraini regime, while Iran was reputedly assisting the opposition. America, whose Fifth Fleet is headquartered in Bahrain, was floating uncomfortably in the middle, torn between its own security needs, supporting democratic reforms, and fending off Iranian aggression in the Gulf. Once again, I was in a world, like Greene’s 1950s Vietnam, with many views and players—none perfect or unblemished. Another thorny tangle that seemed to dare outsiders to get involved: Just try to pick a side.
My years in the Middle East made plain the challenges of American and foreign involvement. I found myself thinking back to The Quiet American. Not long after leaving Bahrain, I opened my computer and began writing my first novel, The Peacock and the Sparrow. It’s about an aging, apathetic spy, Shane Collins, stationed in Bahrain for his final tour. Tasked with uncovering Iranian support for the Arab Spring, Collins discovers his informant has murky allegiances; his ambitious station chief supports the regime at seemingly any cost; his lover, straddling the worlds of East and West, harbors her own secrets. Little by little, Collins gets involved, becoming entangled in murder, consuming love, and an unpredictable revolution. Ultimately, he sheds his indifference and chooses sides, much like Fowler, whose informant famously observes, “Sooner or later…one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.” More than half a century after The Quiet American was written, I’d found a well of inspiration in Greene’s wisdom.
I often say that my novel is about the power and perils of belief. The simultaneous exhilaration and risk of doing something. “My downfall was also my salvation,” Collins reassures himself during his final, daring mission in The Peacock and the Sparrow. Stepping off the sidelines can be hazardous, but it’s also tempting, perhaps irresistible—as tempting as a river, a breeze, a pipe of opium, or the touch of a girl who might tell you she loves you.
I.S. Berry is the award-winning author of The Peacock and the Sparrow.
