Generally, book clubs tend to gravitate toward new, hardback releases: eagerly awaited books by big names such as John Grisham or Steven King, or new novels by first-time authors predicted to be the Next Big Thing in the publishing world. For this month’s selection, the Sunday Book Club has decided to go out on a limb and spotlight a classic novel that originally hit bookshelves in 1955: Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American.”

Greene

Greene, himself a journalist stationed in Indochina (now Vietnam) during the French Indochina war, crafted his story around the tense period of colonial unrest that preceded America’s full-scale involvement in the Vietnam War. Greene expertly weaves together the story lines of a murder mystery, a political thriller and a love story centered on three main characters: Thomas Fowler, a jaded, middle-aged British journalist; Alden Pyle, a young, idealistic CIA agent posing as an American aid worker; and Phuong, the beautiful Vietnamese girl whom they both love.

Until now, I had never read any of Greene’s work and was only vaguely familiar with the title. “The Quiet American” proved to be a pleasant surprise. Greene, who died in 1991, had an exceptional talent for characterization, for all of the three main characters are fully realized and full of conflicts and flaws that make them all too human.

Greene’s narrator, Fowler, has become disillusioned with his role as a reporter and is more concerned with continuing the life he has made for himself in Vietnam with his mistress, Phuong, away from his wife and the dreary modern world of England. Fowler, who seems to prefer to look at the world through a haze of opium, tries throughout the novel — unsuccessfully — to distance himself from the conflict around him:

“‘I’m not involved. Not involved,’ I repeated. It had been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action — even an opinion is a kind of action.”

Pyle, “the quiet American,” has been sent to Asia by the CIA and poses as an aid worker. He is immediately drawn to Fowler, who seems almost amused by Pyle’s naive idealism and commitment. Pyle is also attracted to Fowler’s mistress, Phuong, whose chief motivation seems to be to cling to any man who can marry her and bring her to America. Pyle’s mission, and his relationship with Fowler, is complicated by his desire for Phuong.

When the novel opens, Pyle has been murdered, and Fowler is summoned to the local French law enforcement agency for questioning. The majority of the novel unfolds via flashbacks — Fowler’s first meeting with Pyle, Phuong’s decision to leave Fowler and marry Pyle, the events leading up to Pyle’s death, his secretive mission and the ongoing hostilities between the French and the Vietminh.

I can think of no better way to describe Greene’s style than to say that at times it is lush, almost sultry. Many of his vignettes are softly blurred around the edges, like the smoky haze of a cabaret, or the world as seen through the blurred perception of opium:

“Out on the waterfront slept the ships, ‘dont l’humeur est vagabonde.’ I thought that if I smelt her skin it would have the faintest fragrance of opium, and her colour was that of the small flame. I had seen the flowers on her dress beside the canals in the north, she was indigenous like a herb, and I never wanted to go home.”

Greene also has a talent for capturing the spirit of Vietnamese city life before the war:

“I went home to leave a note for Phuong in the rue Catinat and then drove down past the port as the sun set. The tables and chairs were out on the quai beside the steamers and the grey naval boats, and the little portable kitchens burned and bubbled. In the Boulevard de la Somme the hairdressers were busy under the trees and the fortune-tellers squatted against the walls with their soiled packs of cards. In Cholon you were in a different city where work seemed to be just beginning rather than petering out with the daylight. It was like driving into a pantomime set: the long vertical Chinese signs and the bright lights and the crowd of extras led you into the wings, where everything was so much darker and quieter. One such wing took me down the quai and a huddle of sampans, where warehouses yawned in the shadow and no one was about.”

Our motivation for this month’s choice was twofold. First, as talk of war in Iraq begins to dominate our headlines more and more, it’s interesting to take a fictional look at another controversial war — the Vietnam conflict. Americans seem divided over what our role should be in Iraq, and often the current issue is compared to the bitter divide that split the American people over sending our troops to Vietnam. The idea is that by spotlighting Graham’s legendary novel we may gain some new insight, or at least encourage new dialogue, about what America’s role in places like Iraq should be.

The second motivation is simple: Oscar. Yes, that shiny golden token of success that drives Hollywood to distraction. It is awards season, and Graham’s novel recently underwent its second cinematic interpretation in the form of a soon-to-be-released film starring Sir Michael Caine as Fowler and Brendan Fraser as Pyle. According to numerous news reports, Caine’s performance as the opium-addicted, disaffected British journalist is a shoo-in for a best actor nomination later this week. And, of course, it’s always interesting to compare the print version to the big-screen interpretation.