Two Books - "The Quiet American" and "Sidney Chambers and The Shadow of Death"

Happy New Year everyone!  I read a couple of books over the holiday and, in keeping with current tradition, offer a few quick thoughts on each.

First, The Quiet American by Graham Greene.

I must say, I made the initial mistake of thinking that Graham Greene himself was an American, and was rather proud of myself for picking an American author for once. Then, as a I started reading, I looked him up on Wikipedia and found out that yes, Graham Greene is indeed British.  Surprise surprise.  

So, the book.  You have Thomas Fowler, a wordly and middle aged British journalist covering the French-Indochina war in Vietnam.  You have his Vietnamese live in lover, Phuong.  And then you have this young starry eyed idealist named Pyle, who arrives on a mission for the department of agriculture or something but is clearly involved with the CIA.  He's read many books on what is necessary in the East to combat communism, and has been charged - or at least has the latitude -  to raise a "Third Force" against the communists which are slowly wearing the French down.

Pyle falls in love with Phuong, and he rather brazenly and with great arrogance and yet somehow great kindness tells Fowler this, and proceeds to basically steal her away from him, though mostly through machinations with her family rather than any real appeal to her own feeling.  He offers her a better life, an American life, rather than accept her own her own terms.  I'm not sure Fowler really accepts Phuong on her own terms either, but she seems delightful and she helps feed his opium habit and I guess that is enough for him.

Pyle's secret activities start resulting in bombings in which innocent people are killed, and Fowler sees an opportunity to get rid of Pyle -- he goes in cahoots with some people that want to assassinate Fowler and basically sets him up for it.  Phuong goes back to Fowler as if nothing had ever happened.  

And there is more to it, a few war scenes with the French and some other conversations that are interesting, but you get the gist of the story.  I like to think that Pyle and Fowler are emblematic of the nations that they are from.  Here's Pyle, the British person, as weary of war and colonialism as the British Empire was in the 1950's which, exhausted after World War II, vanished with some rapidity.  And then there is Pyle, the American, who has a quiet arrogance in thinking his way is the best way, who has read a lot of books but really has no idea what he is doing, no idea what he has just walked in to.  

Sounds familiar.  There is an arrogance about us as Americans (though its not so quiet now) where we automatically assume that our way of life is the best.  It would seem to be.  We are the richest, most powerful nation in the world.  But then we assume everything automatically wants the same thing, and are flabbergasted when it turns out that maybe they don't, that they have a different set of values that lead to different ways of life. This is a lesson somehow we never seem to learn.  We cannot remake the entire world in our own image, for good or ill.

But it was a good book, a sad and sometimes beautiful book. But a heavy book, something that requires a lighter follow-up.

Enter Sidney Chambers and The Shadow of Death the first book in the Grantchester series.  The television adaptation is sometimes on Masterpiece Theatre but is something I have never watched.  I saw it in the Library and thought "why not"?

It turned out to be a good find.  

Sidney Chambers is a young British vicar who has a parish outside Cambridge in the early 1950's.  Crime seems to find him, and he becomes this sort of part time detective through a desire to see justice served and/or because after some initial reluctance the local police realize he has a knack for going places and observing things that they can't.  This book is organized into six small cases, ranging from murder to a missing wedding ring to an art crime that goes very, very dark rather quickly.  Meanwhile Chambers pines away for Amanda Kendell who, why perhaps interested in the vicar romantically, can't see herself marrying a priest.    She does, however, buy him a dog, Dickens, a giant black lab whom he grudgingly adopts as a companion.

I thought it was delightful.  Aside from the art crime section (where Amanda Kendall gets kidnapped by the perpetrator and is nearly (though not) raped) it is a very light read, smooth and silky as a Boddington's Pub Ale, full of interesting characters.  And the author does a really good job of capturing the mood in Great Britain at the time.  The war was over, and it was won, but it colors everything and the deaths and suffering have hardened people some - and Church attendence is down, perhaps as people have difficulty dealing with the suffering the War wrought.  But food rationing is finally ending and perhaps better days lie ahead....

Anyways, its a series I'll certainly continue, hopefully, to enjoy.