"Third Force" against both the French Colonials and the Communists. "or whatever his gang are called," and is convinced that in intriguing with the dissident General Tho he is moving effectively to create a
There is nothing self-interested in his motivesįor the villainy which Greene has concocted for his role. Pyle is an idealistic young United States official with gangly legs, a crew cut and a "wide campus gaze." He is the son of a famous professor who lives on Chestnut Street in Boston. Phuong, away from him, but has tried to do it in as candid and decent fashion as possible. Intending to marry her, Pyle has taken Fowler's mistress, Fowler sets to work to discover the author of this outrage and finds it to be an American, Pyle, whom he already knows as a love rival. A badly timed bombing in the public square of Saigon, planned to disrupt a parade, In this novel, as in Greene's earlier "entertainment," "This Gun for Hire," a murderous outrage occurs, intended to affect the war's course. The sensual Fowler, incidentally, seems to have been tired of everything, including himself. "I was tired of the whole pack of them, with their private stores of Coca-Cola and their portable hospitals and their wide cars and their not quite latest guns." Above all, he is moved by his hatred of the Americans. Everything that the British reporter, Fowler, sees of the war, of the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, drives him out of his "uninvolvedness" towardĪ decision. The effect of circumstances is specifically ideological and political. In Greene's previous novels, geographic and social backgrounds have been used with great skill to make the foreground action more dramatic, but social or national issues have never been argued for their own sake. America should leave Asians to work out their own destinies, even when this means the victory of communism.
When her representatives intervene in otherĬountries' affairs it causes only suffering. The thesis is quite simply that America is a crassly materialistic and "innocent" nation with no understanding of other peoples. To the political thesis which they dramatize and which is stated baldly and explicitly throughout the book.Īs the title suggests, America is the principal concern. Into it is mixed the rivalry of two white men for a Vietnamese girl. Political action and commitment, Greene tells a complex but compelling story of intrigue and counter-intrigue, bombing and murder. Easily, with long-practiced and even astonishing skill, speaking with the voice of a British reporter who is forced, despite himself, toward
It is a political novel - or parable - about the war in Indochina, employing itsĬharacters less as individuals than as representatives of their nations or political factions. Raham Greene's new book is quite different from anything he has written before. MaIn Our Time No Man Is a Neutral By ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS
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