It was on the road to Tây Ninh that Thomas Fowler and Alden Pyle found themselves trapped, in Greene’s The Quiet American, in a watchtower surrounded by Viet Minh; on the road to Tây Ninh that they escaped into the rice paddies moments before the watchtower was blown to pieces.
I had been excited about taking the road to Tây Ninh for this reason, but the watchtowers are long gone now. They have been replaced by the kind of cheap roadside eateries and and stores of indeterminate wares and functions, no better or worse than, and certainly no different from, the kind of single-room, concrete-floored places that characterise semi-urban roads like this the world over. One could could be in almost any developing or newly-industrialised country: South Africa, Indonesia, Mexico. One could even be in certain areas of the American South. Fowler and Pyle are nowhere to be seen.
Matthew Clayfield
Matthew Clayfield is a journalist, critic and screenwriter.
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