The Quiet American, by Graham Green

This is the first Green I've read – why!?!

I couldn't put it down, and so chewed through the 180 pages in a day. I found the control of narrative and characterisation superb, and the actual content – meddling American influence in Vietnam, in the late 1950s – prescient. 

And when, late in the novel, our narrator, Fowler, says 

He's a superior sort of journalist –– they call them diplomatic correspondents. He gets hold of an idea and then alters every situation to fit the idea

I couldn't help thinking: this basically describes how people act on social media, screaming as they fit all things into their worldview. It is all very silly.

However, there is are two problems with that statement, being 1) I too have fallen into that trap, long and often. And each time it, eventually, or even immediately, leaves me feeling empty, unloosed, and with a grating restlessness which I do not like, and 2) it is in itself quite possibly an example of the very issue it professes to diagnose in others.

At this point, I do not know how to resolve that. Is mere awareness enough? Is a refusal to engage in the hyperbolic silliness of social media what I should do (yes, I think so: it has in no way made my life better). Perhaps, and this is where my mind is drawn, I need to spend more time with books and observing the world around me. 

There is an irony in the title of the novel, for the American in it is not quiet at all. His presence is constant, and inescapable for Fowler, and it culminates in the orchestration of a bombing in central Saigon. The bombing was, ostensibly, intended for a parade of soldiers, but it had been cancelled and Pyle, our quiet American, did not know as he was out of town. The facts changed. The idea didn't.