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The Quiet American

by Graham Greene

3.92 · rating details · 10,254 ratings · 827 reviews

The Quiet American is a terrifying portrait of innocence at large. While the French Army in Indo-China is grappling with the Vietminh, back at Saigon a young and high-minded American begins to channel economic aid to a 'Third Force'.

Fowler, a seasoned foreign correspondent, observes: 'I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.' As young Pyl

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Paperback, 180 pages

Published August 31st 2004 by Penguin Books (first published 1955)

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Feb 03, 2010

Jen rated it

Recommends it for: the usual suspects

Recommended to Jen by: um. Gary? Ben?

Shelves: classics, lit-fic, spirituality-religion

My time on Earth will be brief, very brief, inconsequential really to things like North America's seasonal movements, Earth's orbit, and the galaxy's star patterns. Yet I, and pretty much everyone else with as brief a life as mine, continue the search for meaning and meaningful experience (stupid humans). Are we looking for profundity in the brevity, a way to either surpass our life's span or are we simply trying to forget about its paltry duration? Birthing, dying, birthing, dying....ad in...more My time on Earth will be brief, very brief, inconsequential really to things like North America's seasonal movements, Earth's orbit, and the galaxy's star patterns. Yet I, and pretty much everyone else with as brief a life as mine, continue the search for meaning and meaningful experience (stupid humans). Are we looking for profundity in the brevity, a way to either surpass our life's span or are we simply trying to forget about its paltry duration? Birthing, dying, birthing, dying....ad infinitum ad nauseam. But there it is. And perhaps, more than anything else, this is true: there is an end and a beginning. A beginning and an end. To everything. Change wins. It's not always the best feeling, or a pithy sentiment one should use while patting the back of the bereaved at a funeral.
Graham Greene wrote, "From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year...If not next year, in three years. Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying." And although not everyone can believe in God, we can all agree that the guy that wrote that so eloquently is dead. Change wins again.
Despite being the kind of person who simply cannot divorce myself from the concept of God, I understand the previous paragraph. I can see how this changeless and permanent idea is an aberration, but its calmative powers are not that insignificant. The idea that there is something greater than life and death, past all effort of comprehension. To think that sense just might be made of brutality and senseless war and that if a mind was large enough, distanced enough, unclouded by stupidity or bravery, fear or pride...that maybe it can be just enough to convince some to risk doing the right thing for some of the right reasons. Was this what Greene was getting at in TQA? I may never know. But these are the things through his writing that are getting to me. (less)

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Jan 07, 2010

Ben rated it

Shelves: good-fiction, read-in-2009, war, favorites, romantic-love-and-hate, funny-shit, memorable-characters, tough-guys-and-gals

"War and Love -- they have always been compared."

Like The End of the Affair, this is a Greene novel that affects you viscerally. It is a war novel, set in Vietnam. Being so, it is not cheerful or pretty: dead children lying in the street and the like. It hits on the complexities of war; the complexity of morals: how it's impossible to stay neutral forever on such matters when you’re directly involved: you have to make a decision: you must decide, or you're as good as dea...more

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Sep 08, 2007

Alger rated it

Recommends it for: The intelligent and the aware

Graham Greene is an artist of sarcasm and loathful protagonists. 'The Quiet American' follows in that tradition, but delves into what that means and turns the whole thing on its head. The main character, Fowler, is as foul as his name implies; swearing, drinking, smoking opium, and cheating on his wife with a nubile young Vietnamese girl. Conversely , we are shown the eponymous 'Quiet American', Pyle, who is quiet in that he is sweet, naive, doesn't drink, doesn't do drugs, doesn't forni...more

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Jun 30, 2008

Martine rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: british, film, historical-fiction, modern-fiction, war

The Quiet American is a short novel (180 pages), but it packs a punch, both emotionally and politically. A masterful study of male rivalry and political engagement set in 1950s Vietnam, it pits against each other two very different men: Thomas Fowler, a jaded, world-weary, ageing British war correspondent, and Alden Pyle, an earnest and idealistic American who has just arrived in Vietnam to work at the Economic Aid Mission and hardly knows anything about the country except what he's read in a bo...moreThe Quiet American is a short novel (180 pages), but it packs a punch, both emotionally and politically. A masterful study of male rivalry and political engagement set in 1950s Vietnam, it pits against each other two very different men: Thomas Fowler, a jaded, world-weary, ageing British war correspondent, and Alden Pyle, an earnest and idealistic American who has just arrived in Vietnam to work at the Economic Aid Mission and hardly knows anything about the country except what he's read in a book. Early on in the story, in a scene whose absurdity belies the increasingly dark tone of the rest of the book, Pyle informs Fowler that he's in love with Fowler's mistress Phuong and intends to have her for his bride, since, let's face it, he has more to offer her than does Fowler. Amazingly, Pyle then goes on to insist on being Fowler's friend, seemingly unaware that the other man sees him as a rival and doesn't really want anything to do with him. So their stories keep weaving in and out of each other, until Pyle is found dead. The question is, who killed him, and why?

The Quiet American is first and foremost a splendid portrait of an unlikely friendship between two men who are not what they seem. Adulterous, opium-smoking Fowler doesn't come across as very likeable at first, but as the story develops, the reader discovers that his cynical exterior hides an all too human heart. For his part, Pyle, whose innocence and naïveté seem delightfully absurd at first, turns out to be a dangerous character who is playing with forces he doesn't understand, with potentially dire consequences for many people. Greene expertly handles the strange relationship between the two men, adding just the right amount of wonder and bitterness to the proceedings. At the same time, though, he tells a story that is much bigger than a bizarre love triangle. Having been a foreign correspondent in Indochina in the early 1950s, Greene obviously knew Vietnam quite well, and it shows in his depiction of the country, a wonderfully vivid place where Communist forces are fighting for freedom, French bureaucrats are trying desperately to hang on to their colonial dreams and war correspondents like Fowler are not sure whether to remain impartial observers or to get involved in the fracas. In spare, minimalist prose, Greene shows what happened in Vietnam when the Americans got involved, and what generally happens when well-intending but badly-informed people start messing in other countries' political problems -- a lesson which over fifty years later still seems frightfully topical. Along the way, he tackles such universal themes as goodness versus selfishness, action versus laissez faire, moral conflict, and the nature of love. Initially, the writing may seem a little too detached to move the reader, but the carefully plotted intrigue, well-drawn explosive atmosphere and powerful ending more than make up for it, making this a well-told story with a message which hasn't lost any of its power in the half century since it was written.
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Oct 06, 2009

Adam rated it

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I don’t know why Greene divides his books into “entertainments” and “novels”, when the novels are so entertaining. But I guess some are more light weight and only meant to entertain, while this book is packed with ideas. Mixing an absurd spy farce, a cynical “love” story, and prophecy of U.S. involvement in Vietnam which was set and written ten years before the hoi polloi of America could probably find Vietnam on a map. Filled with demented nuggets of Greene thought such as “Innocence is a kind ...more

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Apr 07, 2010

Fiona rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: books-i-own, modern-classics, setting-vietnam, 2010

This is my second Greene book and so far, my favourite. Greene is an awesome author - he has the balance of an interesting story and an elegant style of writing that is neither simple or complicated.

The Quiet American is set Vietnam during the war. The main protagonist and narrator is the aging Thomas Fowler, an English journalist who has lived in Vietnam and has a lover, Phuong. Enter Alden Pyle, an idealist young American with big ideas and good intentions who also falls for Phuon...more

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Jun 26, 2010

Sandybanks rated it

Shelves: 2010, british-literature, ebook, greeneland

"God save us always...from the innocent and the good."

Alden Pyle, a young American newly arrived in war-torn Vietnam, is a force for good. He’s all for preserving freedom and liberty for the suffering masses of Asia, after all --- so goes the then popular domino theory --- if Vietnam goes red, so will Siam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. He’s also no fan of the Red’s enemy, the French, who are fighting a losing battle for their Indochinese colony. A ‘Third F...more"God save us always...from the innocent and the good."

Alden Pyle, a young American newly arrived in war-torn Vietnam, is a force for good. He’s all for preserving freedom and liberty for the suffering masses of Asia, after all --- so goes the then popular domino theory --- if Vietnam goes red, so will Siam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia. He’s also no fan of the Red’s enemy, the French, who are fighting a losing battle for their Indochinese colony. A ‘Third Force’ that is composed of native elements (with a little American help) is Vietnam’s best bet, and Pyle is willing to do anything to help it come into power.

Thomas Fowler, a middle-aged British war journo who’s too jaded to take any side in the conflict, views Pyle’s activist idealism with bemused contempt. Separated from his wife, whom he left in England, he takes a young Vietnamese lover, Phuong. Fowler tells himself that he is under no illusion whatsoever in his relationship with her; she is there to provide for his comforts (“… she was the hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain hour of the night, and the promise of rest."), and in return he provides her with the comforts of a Western standard lifestyle. It’s an arrangement, all too common in distant Third World postings, and strictly temporary. He has no plans to ask his wife for a divorce; what would Phuong do in rainy, grey London anyway? However, Phuong has other aspirations. She dreams of a life in the West --- and if her aging lover won’t take her to England, then she’ll go to America instead. Fowler’s contempt for Pyle’s naiveté, both political and romantic, intensifies when Phuong left him for the American. It is so obvious that he is practically considered a main suspect by the Surete when Pyle is found dead not long after.

Despite its espionage trappings, The Quiet American is a morality play, in which all the costs and benefits of a moral decision are so precisely laid up that it’s almost mathematical. Yet, unlike in The Heart of the Matter, another morality play of an almost biblical intensity, the characters are allowed certain shades of ambiguity; they make a deal with the devil and then get on with their compromised lives. The wages of sin now is not necessarily death --- sometimes we weak humans are allowed a little leeway, a little compromise that maybe, somehow, is justifiable in the greater scheme of things.

But Greene’s book is not just a morality tale. It is also a vividly rendered, unsentimental evocation of Vietnam in the 1950’s. Not just the part that was at war against the French (although there is plenty about it too), but also the country that hosts the Cao Dai church, a French planter with an extensive Victorian erotica collection and a Chinese-Vietnamese junk dealer who is also a secret Vietminh agent. These journalistic vignettes constitutes half the pleasure of reading this book for me, the other half constitutes of reading about moral dilemmas that are summed up in angsty, exquisitely phrased aphorisms that perhaps contains more than a kernel of truth ("The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation."). Plenty to ruminate about long after the book is closed.
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Jul 07, 2008

Mike Abraham rated it

The best 1st chapter of any novel I've ever read, though, oddly, it was only on the second read that this became apparent.

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Jul 03, 2007

Jessica Starr rated it

Shelves: favorites

Brilliantly sharp, cold, and witty. Avoid the film adaptation at all costs...

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Jan 27, 2009

Elizabeth added it · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. having finished the book now, I shall add to the review below that about mid-way thru I went from feeling quite lukewarm about this book to loving it--to feeling so deeply sympathetic for the middle-aged, wounded and selfish narrator who is so *determined* not to get involved, and how broken his involvement leaves him in heart and body, even though he gets everything he wants at the end: the divorce, the girl, the job, the death of his rival--which he also gets away with, having engineered it hi...morehaving finished the book now, I shall add to the review below that about mid-way thru I went from feeling quite lukewarm about this book to loving it--to feeling so deeply sympathetic for the middle-aged, wounded and selfish narrator who is so *determined* not to get involved, and how broken his involvement leaves him in heart and body, even though he gets everything he wants at the end: the divorce, the girl, the job, the death of his rival--which he also gets away with, having engineered it himself--and yet, you know, he cares too much about the underhanded way he has achieved all these things to ever be happy with them. And even though you don't feel sorry for the slimedog of a rival (well, *I* don't, thank you very much, but maybe my sympathies were twisted to start with), you still know that the narrator won't be able to live with the guilt.

I wonder what makes me want to de-personalize these characters by not using their names? some kind of distancing technique?

Anyway, it's a great book.

---------------
It took me a while to get into... I was unfairly prejudiced against it thinking, OH GOD, another western journalist in love with a third world sweetheart in a country at war. But I like Graham Greene and of course this predates all the other "western journalist in love" books that I've read recently, and I'd never read a book about Vietnam which also made me keep going, and now I'm halfway thru and suddenly it's just pushing ALL my buttons: two men scrapping over the same girl, lying in a pool of freezing water at the end of their strength in a no man's land where they have no business in a war that isn't theirs, one of them with a broken leg and my sympathy as the jealous and jilted narrator, and the other with the moral upper hand AND youth AND the girl... it's fabulous. Greene is such a subtle writer; he doesn't use italics or exclamation points or, god forbid, ADVERBS (ahem), so you sort of have to extract the *intensity* of the situation by whispering everything aloud as you read to give it emphasis... like a script.

Well, I haven't finished it but you do have an idea of the end before you start, as it's told in flashback. Yet I've no idea how it will get there from here.

I'm loving it so much I had to write about it NOW.(less)

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Jun 09, 2008

Nicole rated it

· review of another edition

This book strikes me as one that people can write great literary analyses of, not because it's old and stodgy and has been classified as a classic perfect for 6th graders, a la The Red Pony but because it's got the sort of action and complex characters that lend themselves to being written about. It wasn't always a page turner, for sure, since it's about one honest man's descent into lies and corruption, and personally I liked Scobie and wasn't always in the mood to witness his self-destructi...more

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Mar 19, 2008

Richard Murff rated it

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. The Quiet American really is the best of Graham Greene’s novels, despite “The Power and the Glory” being widely held as his masterpiece. In typical Greene style, the local of Vietnam of the mid 50’s is painted vividly in its pages. The story is told through the eyes of Fowler, a British journalist covering the war in Vietnam when the only western powers involved was a crumbling colonial France.

Fowler is a vestige of what Rumsfield might have called “old Europe”. He is old, tired, ...more

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Jan 20, 2008

Deborah rated it

Set in 1950s Vietnam, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American is startlingly (and sadly) relevant today. The novel’s title character is a well-meaning idealist from Boston who plays the dangerous game of promoting a “Third Force” in the collapsing French colony. This “Third Force” would, of course, espouse American democratic principals, ensuring a safeguard against evil Communism—the otherwise obvious consequence of the colonialists’ defeat. (Of course, the reader knows this is scheme...more

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Dec 11, 2007

Karen rated it

As a critique of American intervention in foreign affairs, the story was excellent. The "quiet" American (he never shuts up) steps into a world he knows nothing about and creates havoc.

My problem with the book was a problem common to many similar authors (DeLillo, I'm looking at you): it was very male-centric and I got annoyed. Phuong, the love/lust/possession interest in the book, was never given a character, described as innocent, childish, a sexual object, and a car...more

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Oct 23, 2007

Sarah rated it

Easily one of my all-time favorite books, but it's hard to explain why. A naive American CIA operative, fresh from Yale, arrives in Vietnam and promptly steals the narrator's Vietnamese lover/prostitute, then gets himself and several Vietnamese killed. The narrator is a cynical British war correspondent who is a) addicted to opium, b) desperately in love with the Vietnamese prositute as only a drug-addicted war correspondent can be, c) wise enough to see the Yalie's folly and d) a surprisingly...more

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Jan 07, 2008

Michelle rated it

Recommends it for: Everyone

Everyone I've talked to about Greene seems to like his work, and I was not disappointed. This was just a thoughtful novel, written in a plain, forthright style. The story was good - a little mystery - and I like how Greene alternated between starting at the beginning and working forward and starting at the end and working backward. That sounds confusing, but it wasn't. Greene's reflections on war - who is the enemy, who is good, who is innocent, occupation, the effects of the intervention of...more

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Feb 03, 2012

Alexander McNabb rated it

I'm 'come late' to Graham Greene. Blame Brighton Rock being not my cup of tea when I was a teenager. So this is a book I rather forced myself and I'm so glad I did.

It tells of a love triangle between three absurd characters in Vietnam during the early part of the war there - Fowler a weary and experienced British journalist on the slippery slope to decrepitude, Pyle a bumptious and inexperienced idealistic American agent and Phuong an inscrutable, dispassionate Vietnamese girl who sit...more

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Jan 28, 2012

Roger DeBlanck rated it

In one of Greene’s most controversial works, he outlines the complex alliances and deadly politics of Southeast Asia. The narrator, Fowler, is a British correspondent in Vietnam. He wants only to remain neutral and on the periphery as a witness and recorder of the atrocities. He allows no side to engage his emotion and no belief to wrestle with his soul. But when a young American from Washington, Alden Pyle, shows up with a type of “indefatigable mind” trying to alter the region with lofty ideas...more

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Jan 24, 2012

Chris rated it

While I am not a fan of Greene's so-called "Catholic" books, this book, The Quiet American, is certainly one of the greatest books of the 20th century.

Any book which has the courage to face down American self-interest and put that moralizing hyper-power in its proper place in the world is always going to get a great recommendation from me. This book does that beautifully, using intelligent prose and almost poetic drama, in dealing with America's very early secret murderous ...more

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Nov 21, 2011

Pennystevens rated it

This is the first Graham Green I have read and won't be the last. The reader is thrust into the struggle of the French Indochina War (which as its aftermath divided the region into an unstable North and South Vietnam and eventually led to the Vietnam War.) In the Quiet American, a doggedly naïve, innocent and well intentioned American is out of his depth and understanding trying to manipulate a situation he is not equipped to grasp. Greene’s writing is spare and unsentimental.
I would reco...more

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Aug 31, 2011

Evan Brown rated it

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Innocence

The term “innocence” continues to appear in The Quiet American and we learn very quickly that Fowler has his own definition. “Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering around the world, meaning no harm.” Innocence is also dangerous according to Fowler. He considers Pyle to be the most dangerous man he knows. Fowler knows that Pyle is intelligent (a Harvard boy), and has good intentions at heart, but he is entirely ignorant to the local politics. He w...more

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Aug 04, 2011

Maiga Milbourne rated it

This book is inherently racist, sexist, imperialist, and xenophobic. However, I adjust my expectations when reading a white male British author of this time period. Given the obvious issues of the writer, there is a surprising awareness of the arrogance of foreign intervention, and an astute critique of the US's foreign relations. This book is about Vietnam but is incredibly pertinent given today's war against Iraq and Afghanistan.

Phoeng, the heroine, is an obvious metaphor for Vietnam itself...more

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Jul 27, 2011

Oliver Copsey added it

An excellent book, an easy 4 stars. Greene's pros are very clean and engaging.

Interesting that it was written before the Vietnam War, or at the least during the French involvement that presaged the American escalation. All the same Greene recognised that the latter would inevitably come and tells a story which deals in part with this.

It is quiet simple, heavily dialogue orientated and occasionally a little dry.

I would like to have seen more meaningful parallels drawn with Vietnam’s history or ...more

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Jun 23, 2011

Bára Bryndís rated it

Frábær bók, snúin og margræð. Titilpersónan "Hinn þögli ameríkumaður" er ekki eins þögull og hann hefði átt að vera í ljósi ungæðislegrar heimsku sinnar sem Greene lýsir á frábæran hátt. Sögumaður, Powler er breskur stríðsfréttamaður í Saigon í stríði frakka og Viet Minh um 1950. Átök hans og ameríkumannsins um stúlkuna Phuong endurspegla ólíkar hugmyndir þeirra (og þjóðanna) til nýlendnanna í Indókína. Powler miðaldra, blankur og fastur í dauðu hjónabandi reynir af örvæntingu að hald...more

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May 05, 2011

MacK rated it

Shelves: brit-lit, classics

Cliches are more true than we like to admit, and while reading The Quiet American. I kept thinking about that once poetic turn of phrase, repeated and regurgitated to the point of cliche. I kept thinking: "All is fair in love and war".
That's an incredibly reductive reading of a complex novel. Greene, a British bred author who delights in clever truisms and unforeseen shifts in character, is terrific at writing about a world on the brink of globalization. His story from a tense, da...moreCliches are more true than we like to admit, and while reading The Quiet American. I kept thinking about that once poetic turn of phrase, repeated and regurgitated to the point of cliche. I kept thinking: "All is fair in love and war".
That's an incredibly reductive reading of a complex novel. Greene, a British bred author who delights in clever truisms and unforeseen shifts in character, is terrific at writing about a world on the brink of globalization. His story from a tense, dangerous Indochina wracked by slowly simmering civil/colonial war is remarkably prescient as it passes the torch of world domination from Europe to America. His primary characters, jaded British journalist Thomas Fowler and clean-cut American innocent Alden Pyle, exist in clear opposition from the first pages. Pyle and Fowler differ in their temperament, politics and stature and it doesn't take much effort to seem them as allegorical representations of England and America. (Indeed, that view explains the seething contempt with which American scholars viewed the book after it's release.) And as the last 50 years have borne out: our nation's youthful exuberance and geopolitical stature both repeat the habits of our European forbearers while maintaining a unique perspective on our place in the world.
Yet, this isn't a novel just about war, or political gamesmanship, or historical legacies. Most of the plot is given over to how Fowler and Pyle fight for the affections of a Vietnamese woman named Phuong. They pursue her with behaviors and traits that reflect their backgrounds and beliefs and, perhaps, you could see Phuong as some sort of stand-in for "innocent natives" around the world. But, for me, it seemed that this was a primarily human story, a petty, private dispute between two men over one woman who had little say in the process. That's good story to tell, but as the battle for love goes on and we slowly realize that neither man is particularly admirable, Greene asks the reader to have an emotional stake in the fate of either ambiguous characters or abstract concepts. And though he is undoubtedly a gifted writer, I simply couldn't drum up the enthusiasm to feel much more than ambivalence about the entire affair.
It's true: all is fair in love and war. It's true as Fowler and Pyle fight over Phuong; it's true as civil war engulfs a small nation; it's true as superpowers jockey for position. Greene's a gifted writer and explains all this with a clever grace and excellent style. But the problem with cliches is that, even though they're true, they don't really elicit a strong reaction.(less)

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Dec 12, 2010

Ugh rated it

Actually I wouldn't describe this as "amazing", but I think it deserves its 5 stars nevertheless. It's not spectacular or unusual or ambitious enough to be amazing, but it's such an anjoyably smooth and engaging read, the main character is so easy to sympathize with, the dialogue is sharp, there are moments of beauty and of poignancy, and I can't actually find a single thing I don't like about it. Maybe it helps that it isn't too complex or ambitious, because that gives it less opportu...more

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Nov 19, 2010

Felix Dance rated it

I’d picked this book up at the Hanoi Backpacker’s hostel and it survived for so long because it was too short to make much of a weight difference. I’d been long recommended Graham Greene by my Auntie Ruth, and this particular story from having seen the film starring Michael Cane. Thomas Fowler is a British newspaper correspondent living in Saigon while the French fight for their colony against various local factions. Meeting an eager young ‘Quiet American’, Alden Piles, he finds himself in a com...more

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Sep 30, 2010

Kaung Myat rated it

Shelves: political-fiction, crime-mystery-and-thriller

"The Quiet American" by Graham Greene is an interesting profound read. An American young naive idealistic Harvard graduate Pyle arrives at and work at the Economic Attaché in Saigon. Alden Pyle is an idealist who after reading a series of book about democracy by a fictional author York Harding who proposes a Third Force between nationalists(the Communist Vietminh led by Ho Chi Minh) and the colonists(the French) decides to instill democracy in Vietnam in French Indochina by supporting ...more"The Quiet American" by Graham Greene is an interesting profound read. An American young naive idealistic Harvard graduate Pyle arrives at and work at the Economic Attaché in Saigon. Alden Pyle is an idealist who after reading a series of book about democracy by a fictional author York Harding who proposes a Third Force between nationalists(the Communist Vietminh led by Ho Chi Minh) and the colonists(the French) decides to instill democracy in Vietnam in French Indochina by supporting General Thé, the leader of an insurgency group called the Caodists who fights both the French and the Communists from the jungle. He accidentally met the narrator of the novel, Thomas Fowler, a British journalist in his fifties who mocks Pyle's childish idealism and the U.S Foreign Policy and the Americans overall. I don't quite remember reading about him mocking the French nor the Vietnamese. The two men then find themselves falling for the same woman, a Vietnamese beauty Phoung who's only twenty and known as the most beautiful woman in Saigon. A fascinating book, Greene warned about the intervention of a major political power, the United States in the political affairs of an undeveloped third-world country Vietnam in the name of democracy saying that the end-results would only be ugly and deadly. In those days the 1950s to be exact, the young and arrogant USA was on the rise while old colonial powers like the United Kingdom and France were falling on the world political stage. Despite its popularity in England, some critics in USA disliked it hugely and condemned as anti-American. One critic for example wrote that "American readers were incensed, perhaps not so much because of the biased portrait of obtuse and destructive American innocence and idealism in Alden Pyle, but because in this case it was drawn with such acid pleasure by a middle-class English snob like Thomas Fowler whom they were all too ready to identify with Greene himself”. All in all, a masterful novel full of metaphors, ideologies and mockeries, "The Quiet American" is a book sure not to be missed if you are interested in politics, history, sociology, South East Asia, the 1950s, the Cold War(you get the idea) (less)

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Jul 27, 2010

Rowland Bismark rated it

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The Quiet American, a man bound by idealistic but dangerously foolish notions, is the first OSS operative from the USA in Vietnam in the early 50's during the French Indochina conflict. His story is told by a seasoned, somewhat embittered, English war reporter living in Saigon. Green's inimitable style and his ability to reach into the soul of his characters paints a story of war, honestly told, and the politics that superseded the value of human life. Also poignant is the foretelling of the ...more

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Jun 11, 2010

Laurie rated it

· review of another edition

The setting for this story, published in 1955, is Indochina during the early 1950's. France had been a Colonial power in the region; a transition to greater independence (Cambodia, Laos) was ongoing. In the area of Vietnam, Nationalists were fighting to combine some areas, aided by Communists, and France was fighting against this. Complicated! The story's protagonist, Thomas Fowler, is a cynical, British journalist who left Britain for the Far East and had no wish to return to England. Fowler m...more

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About Graham Greene

Graham Greene was an English novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenplay writer, travel writer and critic whose works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world. Greene combined serious literary acclaim with wide popularity.

Although Greene objected strongly to being described as a “Catholic novelist” rather than as a “novelist who happened to be Cath...more

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Quotes from The Quiet American

“Innocence is a kind of insanity” — 60 people liked it

“I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings.” — 30 people liked it

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The Quiet American

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