![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() There’s a Vietnamese woman, Phuong, whom they tussle over (of course) but the more sinister thread, with political undertones that reverberate to this day, is Fowler’s suspicion that Pyle was involved in a bombing as he did his part seeking to create a “Third Way” between communism and colonialism, riding roughshod over the actual needs and wants of the Vietnamese. The novel opens with the death of the eponymous American diplomat Pyle, and a series of flashbacks shows the difficult history of their relationship. ![]() Like Norman Lewis’ travel memoir Dragon Apparent, Greene eschews sentimentalisation, for the most part, again an unexpectedly refreshing take when one has become a little numbed by a lot of the insipid travel writing colliding around the web these days (we should know, we write some of it…) Greene, who was a correspondent himself in Vietnam from 1951 to 1954 and found inspiration in a real life American he once shared a ride with, writes from the perspective of Fowler, a jaded British foreign correspondent and long-time Saigon resident. The multi-layered, sparsely written novel set in the early 1950s remains a searing critique of the US meddling in the internal affairs of a nation and people it knows nothing about. ![]()
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