In Greenland when a man wrestles with his soul he generally wins. Fowler for a change has no faith Catholic or Protestant but he believes in death and his love for Phuong the young Vietnamese girl who as the book opens has called on him to find out where her present lover Pyle might be. Six months have passed since she left him for the younger man who is willing to marry her. This is a book that should be read twice for its film of retrospective irony. Pyle does not show and then the knock at the door and the summons to the Surete and an interview with Vigot who awaits him:
"That was why I refused a cigarette from the French officer at the Surete. After three pipes I felt my mind clear and alert: it could take such decisions easily without losing sight of the main question-what do they want from me? I had met Vigot before several times at parties-I had noticed him because he appeared incongruously in love with his wife, who ignored him, a flashy and false blonde. Now it was two in the morning and he sat tired and depressed in the cigarette smoke and the heavy heat, wearing a green eye-shade, and he had a volume of Pascal open on his desk to while away the time.”
((Pyle has been murdered and as a Frenchman Vigot is obliged to consider a passionnel motive.))
“Not guilty,” I said. I told myself that it was true.....
I told myself again I was innocent, while he went down the stone stairs to where the refrigerating plant hummed in the basement.
After Fowler aka Fowlair has related to Phuong the news of her lover’s death she that night moves back in with him. Then the novel breaks into a flashback about the start of the men’s friendship and because we have been told that Pyle was responsible for the death of at least 50 men we know that he must be a C.I.A. spook pilotfish here to meddle while the Indo China war is going on which France is losing and America is about to take the torch to light up its own defeat. It’s about 1954 and 20 years of conflict yet to come and Saigon is still French Saigon on the beautiful bou’ Rue Catinat where Greene himself stayed in the Continental Hotel. Fowlair puts Pyle in the picture:
“And now,” I said, “there’s General The. He was Caodaist Chief of Staff, but he’s taken to the hills to fight both sides, the French, the Communists. . . .”
“York,” Pyle said, “wrote that what the East needed was a Third Force .”Perhaps I should have seen that fanatic gleam, the quick response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth Column, Third Force, Seventh Day. I might have saved all of us a lot of trouble, even Pyle, if I had realised the direction of that indefatigable young brain. But I left him with the arid bones of background and took my daily walk up and down the rue Catinat. He would have to learn for himself the real background that held you as a smell does: the gold of the rice-fields under a flat late sun: the fisher’s fragile cranes hovering over the fields like mosquitoes: the cups of tea on an old abbot’s platform, with his bed and his commercial calendars, his buckets and broken cups and the junk of a lifetime washed up around his chair: the mollusc hats of the girls repairing the road where a mine had burst: the gold and the young green and the bright dresses of the south, and in the north the deep browns How often I had explained all this before. I was a record always turned on for the benefit of newcomers-the visiting Member of Parliament, the new British Minister. Sometimes I would wake up in the night saying, “Take the case of the Caodaists.” Or the Hoa-Haos or the Binh Xuyen, all the private armies who sold their services for money or revenge. Strangers found them picturesque, but there is looking picturesque in treachery-and distrust.
“And now,” I said, “there’s General The. He was Caodaist Chief of Staff, but he’s taken to the hills to fight both sides, the French, the Communists. . . .”
“York,” Pyle said, “wrote that what the East needed was a Third Force .”Perhaps I should have seen that fanatic gleam, the quick response to a phrase, the magic sound of figures: Fifth Column, Third Force, Seventh Day. I might have saved all of us a lot of trouble, even Pyle, if I had realised the direction of that indefatigable young brain. But I left him with the arid bones of background and took my daily walk up and down the rue Catinat. He would have to learn for himself the real background that held you as a smell does: the gold of the rice-fields under a flat late sun: the fisher’s fragile cranes hovering over the fields like mosquitoes: the cups of tea on an old abbot’s platform, with his bed and his commercial calendars, his buckets and broken cups and the junk of a lifetime washed up around his chair: the mollusc hats of the girls repairing the road where a mine had burst: the gold and the young green and the bright dresses of the south, and in the north the deep browns and the black clothes and the circle of enemy mountains and the drone of planes.
Greene as that chunk of citation demonstrates is a master of atmosphere and the insidious murmur of intuition. This is not going to go well, the cranes seem to nod, but in between there are adventures and expeditions into the countryside which at night reverts to the control of the enemy. Coming back from a religious festival their car gets stranded on a perilous road and they have to take refuge in one of the watchtowers. What happens is perfect for a movie and indeed two were made. But do yourself a turn and read the book. It’s a classic.
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