A few books I enjoyed in 2024

(In no particular order)

I wanted to share my reflections on four pieces of fiction I read this year. I would appreciate any alternative perspectives on these books, or recommendations for what to read in 2025.

The Quiet American by Graham Greene (1955)

Fowler: “How many hundred million Gods do people believe in? Why, even a Roman Catholic believes in quite a different God when he’s scared or happy or hungry.”

Pyle: “Maybe, if there is a God, he’d be so vast he’d look different to everyone.”

The Quiet American is set in South Vietnam in the early 1950s. At the time, the U.S. was slowly supplanting France’s control over Indochina, sending more and more ‘advisors’ to the region and financing about half of France’s war costs. America’s grasping attachment to Vietnam would increase in the decades to come, but, at the time of Greene’s novel, America was still staring over the edge of the precipice. It was an unusually fragile and decisive time in American politics, or perhaps such fragility is only imagined when looking back from a time where the consequences of this era’s commitments are more clear.

The Quiet American breaks through this fragility. The book’s protagonist is a British war reporter named Thomas Fowler, who describes America’s incursions with cynicism and dry humour. He meets Alden Pyle—the young, idealistic American advisor for whom the novel is named. Greene, as embodied in Fowler, questions whether American presence in Vietnam is productive or ethical. The book was published in 1955, ten years before American troops set foot in Vietnam. With the benefit of hindsight, it reads almost prophetically.

The novel does have a life outside its political messaging. Greene takes care to describe the green and gold of the Vietnamese countryside; the hazy warmth of opium during Fowler’s evenings at home; a timeless feeling of distance between ourselves and others. These moments are rendered beautifully.

Overwhelmingly, however, the novel is focused on appraising America’s intentions in Indochina—in a way that many critics of the 1950s found unfair. A writer at the New York Times remarked that “[Greene's] caricatures of American types are often as crude and trite as those of Jean Paul Sartre.” (I have not read any Sartre, but I assume this is trying to communicate disapproval.) There is some merit to this accusation. Sometimes the narrator embarks on an unprompted monologue about American hypocrisy. “Don’t go on in the East with that parrot cry about a threat to the individual soul,” Fowler says to Pyle at one point, “Here you’d find yourself on the wrong side—it’s they who stand for the individual and we just stand for Private 23987, unit in the global strategy.” This strikes me as an oddly theatrical statement to include in normal conversation. In moments like these, the political substance behind the fiction is veiled too thinly for my liking.

Yet I don't feel the novel is consistently negative in its view of Pyle, or even America at large. Greene captures an endearing side of idealism. Pyle’s answer to the inconsistencies of religion—his suggestion that God might be vast enough to look different to everyone—is unexpectedly romantic. It demonstrates that faith can bend reality in unlikely and beautiful ways. Pyle’s idealism about American presence in Vietnam is misguided, perhaps, but not entirely unsympathetic. Greene describes the “look of pain and disappointment [that] touch[ed] his eyes and mouth when reality didn’t match the romantic ideas he cherished.” I think this is a keenly empathetic account of idealism—it does not condemn Pyle’s romantic ideals, but merely describes the grief of losing these ideals. We can certainly criticise Pyle’s naivety when looking at the war purely through Fowler's eyes. Still, I think the reader is intended to find something valuable and sympathetic (if ultimately unredeeming) in Pyle and in America’s belief in its capacity for good.

It is difficult today to conjure the energy that political idealism requires (or maybe it always has been). The Quiet American will not give you this energy. What I did get from the book was the recognition that there is some implacable beauty in the ideal; in innocence; in cherishing something unreachable by others. Even if those ideals don’t endure.

Slaughterhouse-Five: The Graphic Novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Ryan North, Albert Monteys (original published in 1969, adapted in 2020)

“Is it weird to experience only one moment at a time?”

“Your guide here explained it to me with a metaphor: it’s a bright day, and while you can see all around you, I’m welded to a flatcar on a train that’s always moving, and the only way I can see anything is through six inches of steel pipe... I don’t know that I’m on that train, or that there's anything unusual going on. I just think ‘Well, that’s life.’”

I have a light prejudice against visual adaptations of books that I like. Perhaps this can be interpreted generously as a preference for books as a genre: I think there is value in the slower pace of reading, and in demanding that readers imagine their own characters and places rather than gaze at a prefabricated world. But the more honest explanation is that I am attached to my initial experience of the text. I would like things to be exactly the same as they were the first time, however unachievable and irrational the desire is.

For those who haven’t read Slaughterhouse-Five: the book is about a fictional soldier named Billy Pilgrim, who is captured by Germany and lives through the Allied firebombing of Dresden. His experience is horrifying and exposes the ethical costs of war. In a marked departure from other WWII literature, Billy also travels back and forth through time, meeting an alien species called the Tralfamadore, and so we get to see other snippets of his life.

In spite of my prejudices, I thought North and Monteys’ graphic novel adaptation was really delightful. It is true that something is lost from the original novel—a kind of subtlety that is difficult to achieve in so few words, or maybe just some nice turns of phrase that couldn’t be accommodated in a speech bubble. For example, the flatcar metaphor in Vonnegut’s original novel is a longer and more beautiful passage. It doesn’t carry the same weight in the condensed speech bubble form I quoted at the top of this essay.

But something is gained in adaptation too. In some ways, Slaughterhouse-Five lends itself more naturally to a visual form than a written one. Billy’s time jumps are much easier to follow when we can visually observe changes in his age and environment. The novel’s dark humour carries over well—Monteys’ figures are very facially expressive, which brings out interpersonal dynamics that were less clear (or entirely absent) in the original work. The illustrations are often captivating and evocative in their own right. The most memorable, in my eyes, were Monteys’ full-page landscapes of Dresden before and after firebombing, which expose the costs of aerial attack in brutal detail.

Perhaps most importantly, the graphic adaptation gives authenticity to Billy’s fantastical experiences in a way distinct from the novel. Slaughterhouse-Five is usually understood as a piece of antiwar fiction that records the challenges of PTSD. This interpretation says that Billy does not actually jump through time and meet aliens; these experiences are meant to reflect the psychological distortions caused by the trauma of war. This interpretation is correct, on some level—Vonnegut is drawing upon his own experiences from WWII, and it seems unlikely that he met aliens and jumped through time.

At the same time, I hesitate to reduce the science fiction plotline to an instrument in Vonnegut’s broader argument against war. It feels reductive to dismiss Billy’s interactions with aliens as a PTSD symptom and nothing more, in the same way that I find it reductive to imagine Alice in Wonderland solely as a story about a girl having a strange dream.

I think there is meaning in Billy’s conversations with the aliens. The Tralfamadorians move through time effortlessly; they can go backwards and forwards, and when bad things happen, they merely shift their focus to a different point in the timeline. Maybe this is a more natural way of life. What I appreciate about the flatcar metaphor is that it alienates us from our own experience of the world: why can’t we move back and forth in time as we can through space? When I read this novel for the first time, I had little context about Allied firebombing during WWII, so the antiwar stuff didn’t hit as hard. What I took away was a sense of temporal captivity that I still reflect on occasionally (particularly on days such as January 1st, where things seem to have moved too quickly, and I wish for a little more control over the pace of my own life).

These reflections only take place if, at least temporarily, we treat the Tralfamadorians as real within the context of the book—if we see them as more than a symptom of Billy’s mental condition. I liked the graphic adaptation partially because it treated Billy’s time jumps and alien encounters as concrete and important in themselves. They are illustrated with the same colour and detail as Billy’s ‘real’ experiences in war. If the aliens are indeed a hallucination, they are vivid enough that the reader experiences the hallucination too. We are brought along to Dresden and Tralfamadore alike, perhaps more immersively than is possible in written form.

A Different Drummer by William Melvin Kelley (1962)

“She turned abruptly to the stove, took a plate from the top of a pot of boiling water... brought it to the table and although he thought she might bang it down, set it down quite gently.”

A friend persuaded me recently that the best novels are those where the characters surprise us. Not primarily because the surprises create excitement or suspense, but because the fact of being surprised means that we were expecting something different—that some aspect of the character’s beliefs or intentions was unknown to us. Relationships in real life are remarkably opaque: we don’t know what other people are thinking or how they’ll behave, and often they don’t know either. Good literature captures this uncertainty, my friend argued. What feels hollow about many novels—particularly political ones, which are trying to communicate something specific and intense—is that the interior is exposed with graphic clarity.

A Different Drummer is set in 1957 in an unknown state of the American South. One day in 1957, every black person in the state decides to leave. The novel is told from the perspective of white characters, so the reader doesn’t immediately understand why they leave. In broad strokes, it is because they are exhausted by decades of racism and violence; yet the smaller details—the personal reasons that individual characters have for leaving; the conversations they have with one another along the way—emerge slowly and incompletely over the course of the novel.

Equally uncertain is Kelley’s answer to the perennial question of what motivates violence. Sometimes the book depicts violence rooted in genuine malice. Other times, violence is less controlled—one character kicks another “as one kicks a tin can down a dark street, with absent-minded savagery.” The book is narrated by multiple white residents of the town, most of whom are written empathetically. They are prejudiced but not inherently villainous. And though the story ends in a chilling act of brutality, it doesn’t read nihilistically when considered as a whole.

In other words, the book speaks to heavy themes in American history without reducing these themes into a unified political message. Much is left ambiguous. Beyond this, Kelley is a beautiful writer, and doesn’t neglect smaller domestic moments in the novel. I come back to the quote about the plate (at the top of this essay) not only because it reminds me that our predictions about others can be incorrect—but also because it leaves intact a hopeful fragility in domestic life that, in a novel that contains so much violence, would be easy to tear down.

I’m surprised that this book isn’t more widely included in discussions of Civil Rights-era literature. Maybe it’s because the novel is sharper and more disturbing than To Kill a Mockingbird, or because it is difficult to pin down the precise meaning of Kelley’s alternative history. I hope it makes a resurgence.

The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren (1973), translated by Joan Tate

But that evening, when I was so afraid of dying, he said that as long as I got to Nangiyala, then I would at once be well and strong and even beautiful, too.

“As beautiful as you?” I asked.

“Much more beautiful,” said Jonathan.

Out of all ancient virtues, bravery is perhaps the least recognisable in the world around me. I don’t often see people fight wild animals or go off to war. I don’t know many people who attend life-threatening protests. The people around me still act courageously—it is courageous to express oneself honestly in face of social disapproval, or to quit a stable job to pursue a riskier opportunity, or to let your child do something that worries you—but these risks are different from the risks that I might’ve confronted had I grown up in another time or place. Nothing about my life requires me to sacrifice personal safety for the good of others. I suspect many readers from economically stable, politically peaceful backgrounds have had a similar experience.

What this results in is a kind of fascination with narratives of courage. Most fantasy books are built partially on this fascination—they capture a form of personal sacrifice that is unfamiliar and entrancing. And in a fictional world with inflated personal risks, where choices have steep costs, the values and motivations of each character become clearer. The Brothers Lionheart is one such book. It tells the story of a boy named Karl Lionheart, who joins his older brother Jonathan in an expedition to defeat an evil monster named Katla. Each decision they make comes with the risk of personal suffering or death. Their bravery, as a consequence, is both more foreign and more self-evident than it would be in a book that more closely mimicked my experience of life.

The book is written for children, which partially explains why the characters have relatively simple virtues and motivations. And, to be clear, I wouldn’t want every book to sketch its characters with such transparency. But there is a charming side to this simplicity: it can be nice to see characters for who they really are, the layers of deception and self-consciousness peeled off. Perhaps because of its simplicity, the book is achingly sad in a way I didn’t expect from a Scandinavian children’s classic. The sadness is distilled and uncomplicated, which makes it sharper. There is no elaborate literary ruckus to distract you from the sacrifices that characters make for one another.

Maybe this is the response to my argument about A Different Drummer and the importance of ambiguity. There are enough ambiguous characters in real life: it is reassuring when books contain a more comprehensible type of human. The constancy of Karl and Jonathan—their distinctive moral outlines; the charmingly foreseeable way they care for each other—was a warm addition to my year.

“And then the fire gets smaller and smaller, until only the embers are left, and the shadows thicken in the corners, and I get sleepier and sleepier, and I lie there and don’t cough and Jonathan tells me things. Tells me and tells me and tells me, and in the end I hear his voice just like those whisperings again, and then I fall asleep.”

(Special thanks to Tomas and Hilde for the excellent book recommendation.)