The Quiet American (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

"The Quiet American" is a really interesting and well written novel. It was authored in the 1950s. It is set in Vietnam in the 1950s during fighting that includes the French and predates official American military involvement. The author, Graham Greene is an iconic British author. The protagonist is a British Journalist. The story involves political intrigue, romance, and some adventure. It is not necessarily a fast pacd novel. It is a very well written story that allows for a lot of contemplation. In retrospect it looks like a warning to America about what the future in Vietnam holds. I took my time reading this novel and found it fascinating. This story is the type of novel that is not always a "light read". It is a thinking person's novel. There is some symbolism. I accessed a copy of Spark Notes on line for free and studied the novel as I read. I read chapters and then studied Spark Notes for that chapter. I am glad that I did so. It added to the experience. However the novel is comprehensible without the additional study. I really liked this novel and am quite glad that i read it. In case it matters I also listened on audiobook and read simultaneously. I am glad that I did both. There were times I re read certain episodes that seemed intellectually deep. This is the kind of novel I read when I have time to concentrate. It was both enjoyable and really worth the effort. Thank You...

After William Boyd mentioned that Bond wished he had his Graham Greene novel with him in Solo, I was keen to read some of his work. After a quick search on Amazon, the Quiet American came up as a popular novel, so I ordered a copy right away I was excited to start the book, but soon found myself struggling with the writing. As much as I wanted to, I just couldn’t get into it. This book was written in 1955, so some of the dialogue and vocabulary is not often used in modern day and I think this was where I was struggling. I persevered on and by about page 50, I was totally hooked. I wanted to understand more about Aiden Pyle, his infatuation for Phuong and what he was really doing in Vietnam. The story is great and I can understand why this potentially would be one of the novels read by Ian Flemming’s Bond. I sailed through the pages and needed a few days afterwards to reflect on it all, which to me is a sign of a great read. The story telling, coupled with the whitty dialogue and a great non predictable plot was like nothing I’ve read in a long time. I wholeheartedly recommend reading this book, just be prepared for a slightly tough read at first and you will be rewarded for sticking it out.

Published in 1955, this book by acclaimed author Graham Greene is remarkably prescient. In this account, a jaded British newspaperman has spent years covering the resistance to French colonization in Vietnam. While he has a wife back in England, he has been in a long term relationship with a local Vietnamese woman for years. Then one day a seemingly bright though innocent American shows up, saying he's there to help the Vietnamese people. It soon becomes clear that though this American Pyle had presented himself as a humanitarian, in actuality, he is with American intelligence (it's unclear if the initials CIA were well known in 1955 as they are today; they are never mentioned here). The journalist, Fowler, comes across evidence that Pyle is equipping Vietnamese rebels with material to construct bombs. Fowler confronts him about this, and Pyle's true feelings about the people he is there to "help" become clear. He sees them as children who need the helping hand of the white man to make sure they don't go down wayward paths, for example, by choosing Communism. Things eventually come to a head in dramatic fashion, and one can see how many already thought that Western meddling in these locals was a path to hell. This book is justifiably a classic, and the trope about the "Quiet American" who arrives with the best of intentions and little else is brilliantly introduced by Greene in this book. This book will appeal to fans of classic literature, the Cold War era, or traditional spy fiction.

The setting Vietnam near the end of the French occupation. A middle age English correspondent languishes in the sultry climate having as his companion a beautiful young Vietnamese girl. At this point in his life she and his nightly opium pipes are his only preoccupations. He befriends a young American secret agent disguised as a member of an aide agency. The American falls in love with the English man’s mistress. This eventually leads to his demise at the hands of the Vietminh who are assisted by the English man’s mistress.

The edges of the book pages are not evenly cut. Binding is tight. overall the quality of the book is ok.

Set in the days before the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, this story kept me interested to the last page. The American idealism, the French bitter colonialism, and the British disengagement interplay in this story where life and death, love and lust, come at the most random moments. “There ain’t no good guys. There ain’t no bad guys. There’s only you and me and we just disagree.”

Or perhaps it's that the 1950s lasted 30 years in England. It was plainly still 1955 in England when i spent some months there in 1979, and indeed I suspect that it was 1955 for Graham Greene from the end of World War 2 until the catastrophe of Margaret Thatcher. Greene wrote six books in the '50s or thereabouts: The Third Man (1949), The End of the Affair, Loser Takes All, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, and A Burnt-Out Case (1960). In none of them was the awkward Quietist Catholicism of his earlier novels sustained; instead both his 'novels' and his 'entertainments' became increasingly anti-colonial in content and critical of both Catholic and Anglo-American values. Throughout his long career, nonetheless, Greene was the most ineffably British of novelists, at least as we readers perceive him through his literary personae, in whom diffidence and arrogance are two faces of the same shilling. The 'narrator' of The Quiet American, the aging British journalist Thomas Fowler, on assignment in French Vietnam, is the epitome of that blend of diffidence and arrogance, the latter politely sheathed by the former. Fowler has a cosy live-in lover, Phuong, a moderate opium dependency, and no desire to return to the UK, to his bitter Anglican wife who refuses him a divorce. At a club with Phuong, he meets Alden Pyle, the "quiet American" of the title, a young, handsome Harvard-grad supposedly in Vietnam on a non-military mission. In fact, Pyle is an OSS agent provocateur, a liaison to the rogue general Trinh Minh The, whom Pyle's superiors perceive as an effective "Third Force" in the war between the French colonialists and the 'communist' Viet Minh. Fowler and Pyle become rivals for 'possession' of Phuong. And that's all I mean to reveal of the plot! This 'triangle of passion' is the skeleton of the novel, but it's Greene's depiction of Alden Pyle that sustains the exceptional interest of the book. Pyle is seemingly a naive idealist, innocent, brash, firmly convinced of the good intentions of his country, committed to the political philosophy of York Harding (an imaginary scholar). There are rumors that Pyle's persona was based on the real-life American Edward Lansdale, a CIA 'counter-insurgency expert' whose interventions in Vietnam, Cuba, and elsewhere qualify him as one of the colorful scoundrels of the 20th C. In any case, Pyle's idealism is of the sort that accommodates slaughter of innocents. To put it bluntly, he's a terrorist, but "our" terrorist. The gauze that separates "idealism" from ideological fanaticism is very thin in Pyle. But Graham Greene is not merely depicting one plausible malefactor -- one who can smile and smile and yet be a villain. Pyle is not only a 'quiet' American; he's an archetypal American, a synecdoche of America as Greene perceived it. "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused," Fowler says about Pyle; Greene is saying the same about America: "I never knew a People who had better motives for all the catastrophes they caused." Remember that Greene wrote this book before 1955, when it was published, and therefore before the French debacle at Dien Biên Phu. But it reveals what everybody except the American public knew: that America was waiting in the wings to take over the anti-communist crusade in 'Indochina'. Pyle describes explicitly to Fowler what later would be called the "Domino Theory". Pyle's utter inability to grasp the mentality of the Vietnamese would become exactly what led to the inability of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon to comprehend why America could only 'win' a war in Vietnam by "turning it into a parking lot". In effect, Graham Greene was the most prescient writer since Nostradamus! This little novel is such an accurate prophecy of the American calamity in Vietnam a decade later that, if it had been read carefully in Washington, it might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

I rarely give a 5 star review but I am compelled to do so in this case. The ability to read the 1955 book through the lens of having gone through the entire America Vietnam experience allows for a more informed response to the book. Greene’s novel is so accurately prescient of what eventually happened in Vietnam during America’s involvement. It’s uncanny. The politics of 1950’s Vietnam are played out in the contrasting views of the young idealistic American Pyle actively and destructively pushing for an American style democracy and much older cynical Fowler who cares only for what peace could mean for the peasants in the rice fields. The war against French colonialism is the backdrop for a love story of both men vying for the same woman, Phong. The older man trying to hang on to Phong and their peaceful relationship and the younger trying to take her away and change her life. Their views on what is best for Phong are metaphorically parallel to their contrasting political views. As is my custom I shall not go into plot detail. Suffice to say that Greene plays this out in exquisite detail with some beautiful writing.