The Quiet American in Espionage Aficionados

Feb 11, 2012 Philip rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: filmed, war-fiction, southeast-asia, cambodia-laos-vietnam, fiction-standalone, 5-stars, spy-fiction-misc, recent-travels, review-includes-personal-nonsense, first-person

I have to give this book 5 stars, as it has a special meaning to me. I actually read this in Saigon in the late '80s (before Americans were supposed to be traveling to Vietnam; but since I was living in Taiwan at the time I was somehow able to get a visa). It was an amazing experience to sit in the Continental Hotel itself and read about how little the place had changed in the intervening 30+ years. (I remember looking around the hotel restaurant and noticing that almost all the foreigners in th ...more

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Aug 06, 2017 Greg rated it it was amazing

Shelves: classic, 1950s, british-authors, graham-greene

Running review.
Thirty pages in, I am enjoying this. Successfully takes one back to the time and place. Early 1950s - Vietnam, Colonialism. An English view of American character abroad. America exporting democracy into the end days of colonial failure and its vacuum of power struggles.
Eighty pages in, really enjoying this, though I'm seeing scenes and faces from the film adaptation. Excellent film, Michael Caine is superb as Thomas Fowler, but I would've preferred to read the book before seeing t Running review.
Thirty pages in, I am enjoying this. Successfully takes one back to the time and place. Early 1950s - Vietnam, Colonialism. An English view of American character abroad. America exporting democracy into the end days of colonial failure and its vacuum of power struggles.
Eighty pages in, really enjoying this, though I'm seeing scenes and faces from the film adaptation. Excellent film, Michael Caine is superb as Thomas Fowler, but I would've preferred to read the book before seeing the film.

This is up there with Graham Greene's best.

First published in 1955, Alden Pyle was a prescient metaphor for the Vietnam War, still to be played out, tragically premised on the fake propaganda of 'the domino effect.'

The Alden Pyle character is a portrait of classic-cliché-in-a-frame of the All American Apple Pie Affluent Conservative who knows it all, has had little life experience outside his privileged background and driven by his simplistic geo-political guru, York Harding. America has to ask itself, after WWII, using the York Harding handbook, why the U.S. has not won any war they have engaged in since. American Determinism should stay home and sort itself out.
The furore around 'alleged' Russian meddling in the 2016/17 presidential election is absolutely breathtaking, incredible, considering the fair bit of meddling the U.S. has done in other countries political process for many years around the world.
The Quiet American appears accurate to history. The Third Force coming in to replace the French and the failed colonialism with a clean slate. Apparently the French, fighting a war at the end of colonialism in Vietnam were using Napalm before America engaged in the fighting. Is that correct?
In The Quiet American, The Vietnamese are described believably, naturally as a people. The French are also described naturally. Greene did not like Americans or American culture. It shows. The character of Pyle a generalised cliché stereotype, a simplistic cheeseburger bull-in-a-china-shop. "At least they won't hate us like they hate the French." Good luck with that.

A writer's memory is long. It is clear Graham Greene disliked America and The Quiet American is the tour de force with which he exacted revenge for having been driven out of England and had to find a country without an extradition treaty with England, all because of his film review of an American movie. He fled to Mexico.

It was probably The Quiet American that got Graham Greene an FBI file, if he hadn't already generated one from the earlier film review. Years later, when his file was declassified he laughed and said they could have saved themselves the trouble and just asked him.

The Quiet American has opened the memory of youth in the late sixties - early seventies. I remember as a young man still too young to vote, but eligible for conscription, waiting to find out if my number came up. Every night watching the News, U.S. planes spraying Napalm and chemical defoliant over lush green jungle and third world villages. And now all these years later America condemnation of the use of chemical weapons in the Middle East. My strongest memory of watching the News of the Vietnam War, planes spraying Napalm, and just knowing that it was fundamentally immoral and wrong. ...more

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Aug 21, 2017 Thomas rated it liked it

Second Graham Greene novel that I've read. I like the hard boiled nature of the Fowler character, which paired with the innocence, but self-assured correctness of Pyle makes for an interesting relationship. Of what I know of the Viet Nam conflict, the analogy of the story is difficult to ignore, but the book was written way before America's involvement. Good plot and story that I felt may have been a model for several more recent espionage novels I've read. Pace of Greene's novels are ploddingly ...more

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