"God save us from the innocent and the good"

Looking at Graham Greene's novels a century after his birth, we see a cool analyst of human venality and corruption -- who warned us long ago about the terrible effects of America's naive meddling in other nations' affairs.

By Laura Miller

Oct 23, 2004 | Graham Greene had a reputation for prophecy; as early as 1955 he published "The Quiet American," a book about the perils of American meddling in Vietnam. What seems like foresight actually came from his knack for cutting down to the heart of the matter -- to appropriate the title of another of his novels, this one about Sierra Leone. It was less that he saw things coming than that he recognized the same scenarios of human foolishness and venality unfolding over and over again. If anything, his was a gift for timing, and it's still in operation, even now, 13 years after his death. His centennial (Greene was born in 1904) arrives just as some of his most barbed political observations have acquired a brand new -- and simultaneously all too familiar -- relevance.

Greene wrote steadily (500 words a day, every day) and as a result produced a large body of work: journalism, travel writing, novels and stories, plays, memoir, criticism. There are several fat veins in his fiction alone: the "Catholic" novels ("The Power and the Glory," "The Heart of the Matter," "The End of the Affair," etc.); thrillers like "The Ministry of Fear" and "Gun for Hire"; comic fiction like "Travels With My Aunt" and "Our Man in Havana" (also a spy novel); and harder to categorize works like "The Quiet American," the book that more than any of his others has stamped itself upon the American imagination. For his centennial, Viking is publishing the third volume of Norman Sherry's mammoth biography and Penguin is reprinting six of his novels in paperback with new introductions by an impressive collection of contemporary writers (more titles will appear early next year).

"The Quiet American" is one of those six newly reprinted books, and, as the 2002 film version demonstrated to many who saw it, Greene's story of an idealistic young American fatally screwing up the lives of a British journalist and his Vietnamese mistress in the waning days of French colonial rule still provokes chills of recognition. But while Greene liked to set his novels in exotic places where daily life warps and splinters under the brute weight of politics, he wasn't in essence a political writer. His novels, unlike "Darkness at Noon" or "All the King's Men," don't concern themselves with how power gets parceled out and used. Rather, he's a moral writer interested in how people's deepest sense of themselves, and their integrity, responds to the terrible pressures that political situations impose.

It's this moral view that makes Greene particularly relevant now, because for the first time in many decades, American foreign policy has been driven by idealism of the kind that motivates Alden Pyle, Greene's quiet American. Pyle's grand, well-scrubbed, secondhand vision of how to remake Vietnam is disastrously incompatible with the place itself. The neoconservative component of the Bush administration that pushed the invasion of Iraq had a dream of democratizing the Middle East, too, a worthy goal however crackpot the plans to achieve it may have been (or how dicey some of their other motives). And that dream was, it turned out, also built on ignorance and air.

Next Page: Greene's religious faith saturates his politics, but it's a long way from George W. Bush's Christian soldiering

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