5★
“‘He’s a good chap in his way. Serious. Not one of those noisy bastards at the Continental. A quiet American,’ I summed him precisely up as I might have said, ‘a blue lizard,’ ‘a white elephant.’”

No, not noisy, but Pyle is a determined young idealist who’s an armchair expert on Vietnam, having read all the books. He arrived with the Economic Aid Mission and wants to save the world. The man describing him above to a Vietnamese policeman is Fowler, a jaded English journalist who’s lived in Vietnam for some years and disputes Pyle’s confirmed belief that Vietnam needs a Third Force to solve its problems.

The story is told partly in the present, and partly in flashbacks. As it opens, Fowler and Phuong have been called to the police station in the middle of the night, where he is asked how he first met Pyle.

“I had seen him last September coming across the square towards the bar of the Continental: an unmistakably young and unused face flung at us like a dart. With his gangly legs and his crew-cut and his wide campus gaze he seemed incapable of harm.”

Fowler always protests that he is not ‘engagé’, he is not taking sides, he is simply a reporter, a journalist, not a correspondent with opinions.

This is the early 1950s, when the French were fighting the communists over control of Vietnam after WWII. Fowler has been covering this for his English paper. He argues half-heartedly with the earnest American, even as he begins to suspect that Pyle’s Economic Aid Mission assignment is possibly a cover for something more sinister.

To complicate things, Pyle falls instantly in love with Phuong, Fowler’s beautiful, graceful Vietnamese girlfriend. His French is minimal, so he needs Fowler to interpret, and he’s so honourable he wouldn’t think of approaching her without Fowler’s ‘permission’.

Phuong has been living with Fowler for a couple of years, preparing his succession of evening opium pipes, adorning his bed, and hoping he will divorce his wife back home, marry her, and take her back to England with him. She pores over magazines about England.

Awkward? Oh yes. Pyle shows up unexpectedly in the middle of the night, out in the countryside where Fowler is accompanying a lieutenant and his men to report on activities. How he got there safely on the river at night is a wonder in itself, but his real reason for coming is unbelievable.

“He began to play with his bootlaces, and there was a long silence. ‘I’m not being quite honest,’ he said at last.

‘No?’

‘I really came to see you.’

‘You came here to see me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

He looked up from his bootlaces in an agony of embarrassment. ‘I had to tell you—I’ve fallen in love with Phuong.’

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. He was so unexpected and so serious. I said, ‘Couldn’t you have waited till I got back? I shall be in Saigon next week.’

‘You might have been killed,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t have been honourable. And then I don’t know if I could have stayed away from Phuong all that time.’

‘You mean, you have stayed away?’

‘Of course. You don’t think I’ll tell her—without you knowing?’

‘People do,’ I said. ‘When did it happen?’

‘I guess it was that night at the Chalet, dancing with her.’

‘I didn’t think you ever got close enough.’

He looked at me in a puzzled way. If his conduct seemed crazy to me, mine was obviously inexplicable to him. He said, ‘You know, I think it was seeing all those girls in that house. They were so pretty. Why, she might have been one of them. I wanted to protect her.’”

He knows about Fowler’s Catholic wife who won’t divorce him, leaving Phuong alone when Fowler is eventually ordered home by his paper.

Between the atrocities Fowler has seen and the impending loss of Phuong, he is becoming engaged in spite of himself, beginning to take sides.

Apparently, this was criticised as anti-American, but eventually it was seen as prophetic. What the author foreshadowed is pretty much what happened. He lived there during these years, and it must have been terrible watching his predictions unfold.

When I began reading, I thought it seemed slow-going, as Fowler smoked pipe after pipe of opium and let himself get foggier and tune out. Then came the clean-cut kid (no pipe, no dope), and it looked like a clear case of jaded war correspondent against well-meaning young do-gooder. But it became something quite different.

I’d like to see both films – the 1958 version with Sir Michael Redgrave and Audie Murphy (the most highly decorated American soldier of WWII and a popular actor), and the 2002 version with Sir Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser. I can imagine them all in those roles.

The book itself is unforgettable.

The Quiet American is a somewhat metaphorical novel which should be read in the context of the political scene in Vietnam before 1954. At the time in which this novel is set, the Vietnamese are still under French colonial rule. The nationalists (the Communist Vietminh), have been fighting to take back the country for some time under the leadership of a returned Ho Chi Minh, and the French are losing their bid to keep control.

Reporting the conflicts in Vietnam for the British press is Thomas Fowler, who has been in Saigon now for some time. Fowler, who narrates the story, claims to be neutral: he says that he does not take sides, get involved or make judgments, but rather just reports the news when the government will let him. He’s a self-proclaimed isolationist. He lives with Phuong, a young Vietnamese girl, but is still married back home in England, although he’s asked for a divorce from his Catholic wife who continues to refuse him. Into Fowler’s world comes Alden Pyle, “Quiet American” of the title. Pyle is a Harvard Grad, and is in the country to work ostensibly under the Economic Attaché. He has adopted the ideas of a theorist named York Harding about necessity of intervention in Asia, and sees the need to establish a so-called “third force” in Vietnam to replace both French colonialism and the Communists. He has already settled on a General Thé, the leader of an insurgency group called the Caodists, who has “taken to the hills to fight both sides, the French, the Communists…” (17). Pyle envisions Thé taking power and settling Vietnam into being a democratic country and helping to prevent the Communist dominoes from falling. According to Pyle, the Vietnamese want to live in a democracy. While Fowler finds Pyle to be a bit naïve, and argues that most peasants don’t sit in their huts at night thinking about democracy and ideologies, he has to start taking him more seriously when Pyle decides he wants Phuong for himself. Fowler knows that the younger, more affluent American has more to offer Phuong in material terms, but he’s become comfortable with the way things are. Pyle’s very existence in Saigon threatens Fowler in ways he never realized. But then again, Fowler is the narrator of this story, so beware.


Solid analyses of this novel are everywhere to be found on the Internet and in several books, so I won’t even attempt to go there, but interestingly, even though he was writing in 1955, Greene was able to foresee the quagmire caused by US intervention in Vietnamese politics. Today one could easily apply his novel to the dangers of intervening in the politics of the Middle East or in the “third world” in general.

It’s an amazing book, definitely one not to be missed. Greene is one of those writers whose works you cannot forget once you’ve read them. Highly recommended and one of my favorites for this year.

Thomas Fowler was a British war correspondent working in Saigon; his Vietnamese mistress Phuong would be waiting when he returned home from his daily mix of horrors and brutality with the opium pipe which gave him mental release. Alden Pyle, the “quiet American” was sent from Washington on a mission of secrecy – but when things went desperately wrong, Fowler found himself protective of Pyle. But what would happen when Pyle decided to take Phuong for himself?

The Quiet American by Graham Greene roamed back and forth in time, sharing views of the narrator (Fowler) and the protagonist (Pyle) while the triangle of Fowler, Pyle and Phuong was an involved and intricate one. There are many and varied ratings for this book – for me I was underwhelmed I’m afraid.

I’ve only read three Graham Greene’s so far, but he definitely seems like a writer whose works I should look into more. Prior to this, I’d read Our Man in Havana and The Power and the Glory. This is a little like a mash up of both. There’s the inept skulduggery of the first, and the searing bleakness and cynicism of the second.

Greene is my kind of guy: He’s got a jaundiced view of people and the world. This novel thrums with moral ambiguity. And reading this now in 2012, some 60 years after it was written, the ambiguity is even more trenchant. We know now that the US went on to fight a war in Vietnam, a war that it would lose rather painfully. We know also that Vietnam fell to the communists. The fragments of peace in this novel look all the more illusory and endangered from this end of time.

Poor Alden. That poor child never stood a chance, although it was frightening to see how quickly his innocence turned into meaningless platitudes. Towards the end, he says, “Well, it’s sad these women and children died, but they died for democracy.” Well, the thought that they did not choose this path or elected to have Alden put them on it never crosses his mind.

The moral ambiguity is far more than poor deluded Alden Pyle’s naive belief in bringing democracy to the natives though. And it relates to far more than just the international political imperatives at play. It goes from the global macro level to the personal micro one too. Our man Fowler looks like a hero no? Albeit a slightly soiled one. But what are we to make of him and his relationship with Phoang?

There is a chilling section in the novel when Fowler’s wife writes back to him, replying to his letter asking for a divorce because he cannot live without Phoang. She points out that he had said exactly the same thing about her too. And about the woman he first left her for. When, she asks, will his promise of forever to Phoang turn to ashes like it did for the other women? What, she asks, will it leave Phoang with, abandoned in cold gloomy England far from home? And we might ask, does he even care that, much older than Phoang, he will inevitably leave her alone and, by then, no longer so pretty as to attract another protector?

And Phoang? She’s a cipher. Greene never lets us into her head. Thankfully, I actually think. The musings of an Occidental male on the thoughts of an Oriental female would only have been a grotesque form of colonialist sexist drag. Nevertheless, we see enough to make us question what love or emotions she has invested in this relationship. As Fowler himself points out, she is looking more for security than she is for romantic love. Just who provides it matters substantially less.

So, knowing what we know now, how do we weigh up the moral choices made by the characters here? Would it have been better if Alden Pyle had not died? And what of Fowler and Phoang? To stay on in Vietnam to see it fall and be killed by the communists? To leave to England where they will both, it is strongly suggested, be completely miserable? Greene asks where our moral choices leave us, and it seems his answer is that whatever path we take, they all lead to damnation. Aw, man, Graham, you're my kind of guy.

The Quiet American by Graham Greene (first edition ISBN-13: 978-0670585526)

Even though it's been about sixty years since I read this novel, I remember it well. A very influential book in my life, in helping me better understand how and why we get into these messes. A soldier myself at the time, my understanding was further reinforced in seeing the 1958 Hollywood adaptation that propagandized the book in turning around its theme. (A 2002 film version was truer to the book.)

Needless to say, I thought at the time, and still do, that it's an important read. And, it's an engrossing story.

[Spoilers hidden 10/6/23]

You always get a good story from Graham Greene along with discussion of moral issues and this book has it all.

The setting is Vietnam in the early 1950s when the French are still fighting to hold on to their colony with American financial assistance and surreptitious military support. The author visited there in 1951. The French pulled out in 1954 and the Americans started coming in.



We have two men who go by their last names: a crusty, hard-drinking, opium-smoking, cynical British journalist - Fowler, and a younger, idealist American named Pyle. The story opens with the death of Pyle and is largely told retrospectively. Here’s what we get:

A Love Story: Both men are in love with a beautiful Vietnamese woman named Phuong.  She’s with Fowler initially but leaves him for Pyle and returns to Fowler after Pyle’s death. The contrast is that idealistic Pyle thinks of marriage and children but those things are pretty far from Fowler’s mind. I’m not giving away plot by revealing that Phuong comes back to Fowler. We know this in the book’s first chapter and that the French police suspect that Fowler may have had a hand in Pyle’s death.

War. Of course, war. So many wars. There’s little gore and only one chapter that focuses on a battle. That battle is told by Fowler from a journalist’s perspective and from a distance. But we get the point when that battle ends with wall-to-wall bodies clogging a canal. “I am reminded now of an Irish stew containing too much meat.”

Politics: In contrast to Pyle’s idealist attitude of ‘wanting to do good and help,’ Fowler’s attitude is ‘what difference can it possibly make’ to these peasants whose main concern is growing enough rice so that they won’t starve? Although it’s not stated in so many words, Fowler is aware of the calculation: how many deaths and maimings is it worth to produce a vague degree of ‘freedom’ a generation from now? 100,000? A million? The author is credited with ‘predicting the outcome’ of American involvement in Vietnam.



Photo of modern Ho Chin Minh City (formerly Saigon,) above; Hanoi below



God: It surprised me how many times one of the characters asked another: Do you believe in God? Again the contrast: Pyle grew up in one of those New England towns going to a white-steepled church. We know where cynical Fowler stands. And yet, we have heard about Greene being considered a ‘Catholic novelist.’ Fowler’s admiration shows for the Catholic nuns and priests who have by necessity evolved into nurses, doctors and aid workers.

A Murder Mystery: Did Fowler kill Pyle or have a hand in his killing? The head police detective thinks so and he questions Fowler several times in the story. What does Phuong think? What does Phuong know?

Last, I’ll add this book to a ‘journalism’ shelf – the life of a war correspondent at a time when news dispatches were sent by telegram. French authorities control the press. Dispatches are censored. Only victories are reported. Body counts are given of the enemy but not of French troops – as if the military had time to count enemy bodies before their own. Nor can Fowler, who works for a British newspaper, ever get a real ‘scoop’ – the telegraph people won’t send his story out until the French press reports it first.

When the book was published in 1955, it was widely considered anti-American and unpatriotic. What is the do-gooder Pyle, some kind of ‘economic attaché,’ doing there anyway?  He’s secretly involved in distributing plastic explosives which will, of course, fall into the wrong hands.  That, and the fact that it was written by a Brit, telling Americans why and how they were wrong.

The book was twice made into American movies, 1958 and 2002. In the 1958 version, the story theme was flipped and Pyle was made into a genuine do-gooder fighting communist villains. The 2002 version by Miramax was true to the original theme of the book but it was scheduled to be released literally in September of 2011 (911). Miramax movies pulled the film and released it a year later.



I had read this book years ago and I enjoyed it again on this second reading. I’ll give it a 5 and add it to my favorites. Graham Greene (1904-1991) is one of my favorite authors and I have also read and reviewed other excellent books by him: The Heart of the Matter, The Power and the Glory, The End of the Affair, The Comedians and Brighton Rock. The End of the Affair and The Quiet American are his two most popular books as measured by number of ratings on GR but The Power and the Glory is considered by some critics to be his ‘masterpiece.’

Thank you to GR friend Cassio for sending me this book recommendation.

Vietnam landscape from vivutravel.com
Ho Chi Minh City from livingnomads.com
Hanoi from Wikipedia.com
The author from karsh.org. wordpress

4.5 ☆

nothing nowadays is fabulous and nothing rises from its ashes

The Quiet American was set during the the early 1950s when France was fighting a losing war to retain Indochina. Battles between the Communist Vietnamese and the French were fiercest in the north, close to the border with China. In the south, Saigon and its environs were also contested territories among the French and various private armies with their own agendas.

n  

n    "I'm not involved." ... It had been an article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved. ...I preferred the title reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action-- even an opinion is a kind of action. n  

n
Based in Saigon, journalist Thomas Fowley narrated the story. As a British national, he was regarded as a neutral party. Not only did Fowler hold himself above geopolitical events, he rejected philosophical doctrines and religious beliefs. His sense of detachment manifested as well in his relationships with women but with one glaring exception -- Phuong. Phuong was his beautiful and much younger Vietnamese girlfriend.

n  

n    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, Phuong would leave me. 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. n  

n
Alden Pyle, the eponymous "quiet American," arrived in Saigon as part of the American Legation's Economic Aid Mission. He barged into Fowler's life and shortly afterwards claimed Fowler as his best friend in Saigon. The two men occupied opposing ends of a see-saw from their level of political engagement, outlook of their future, to the representation of their respective home countries' roles on the global stage.

n  

n    [he] was a serious type. ... He didn't even hear what I said; he was absorbed already in the dilemma of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West; he was determined ... to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world. n  

n
But as soon as Pyle met Phuong, he and Fowler had one goal in common. Both men wanted Phuong. Watch how events unfold for the path of true love does not run smoothly, especially in the midst of war.

n  

n    "It's not a matter of reason or justice. We all get involved in a moment of emotion and then we cannot get out. War and Love-- they have always been compared. "n  

n
The Quiet American was my first novel by Graham Greene. Color me very well pleased. This wasn't just a love story, espionage plot, or mystery set against the backdrop of war, but also a political and philosophical allegory infused with the despairing narrator's wry wit. In this romantic triangle, the middle-aged Fowler represented the old world, the one in which the resplendent British Empire was being dismantled as more of its holdings gained their independence. Pyle represented the ascendancy of America as a power player on the global stage and the fervent and simplistic belief that only one optimal version of governance exists. Their struggle for Phuong was, of course, the conversion of the third world -- to reject Communism in order to embrace Democracy.

This novel has a couple of shortcomings. While I had a solid comprehension of Fowler's character, neither Pyle nor Phuong benefited from a similar level of development. In fact, it was worse for Phuong because Greene had cast her into the stereotypical modes of the "inscrutable Oriental" and the fetishized Asian female. For all I know, given this story's publication in 1955, Greene might have been the first popular novelist to commit that egregious image to paper. Some readers have probably opined that The Quiet American was anti-American. While I can see the basis for that assessment, I noticed that the supercilious Fowler was quite flawed himself as were the French military, which censored the press and condoned collateral damage. If anything, this novel was anti-Western imperialism be it in terms of administrative control or of economic captivity.

The Quiet American wasn't a novel populated with heroes, as conventionally depicted. It should have made a huge splash as an anti-war book when it was first published in 1955, an entire decade before the American government publicly announced the US military involvement in Vietnam. A subsequent ripple would have been the prescient declaration that the West would not prevail in Vietnam and the 1975 proof of that. Nonetheless, I greatly enjoyed The Quiet American from its storyline to its literary style.

Prima di tutto voglio sottolineare la forza della prosa di Greene, che già avevo apprezzato nella lettura del romanzo “Il fattore umano”: spicca per eleganza e sobrietà, capacità descrittive con tratti precisi e essenziali, si tratti di un tramonto o di un panorama suggestivo, l’orrore e la violenza della morte, le pieghe dell’animo umano. Il protagonista non è l’americano tranquillo del titolo ma un personaggio tormentato, un po’ cinico e disilluso, un po’ sensibile e generoso, ben lontano dai cliché del caso.
Al centro della storia uno pseudo triangolo amoroso, che assomiglia più ad un espediente narrativo, una metafora del Vietnam in cui si svolge la vicenda, un mondo ormai scivolato nel conflitto (quello però che precede il più noto con gli USA) che porta i segni della prevaricazione occidentale e del colonialismo, in bilico tra dissolutezza e orgoglio nazionalista, tra opportunismi e opportunità, tra lotta per la sopravvivenza e riscatto.
Si può leggere come una storia d’amore, come un giallo, come una riflessione sull’intensa tazza della guerra, sul ruolo imperialista di alcune potenze nel mondo coloniale, sulla difficoltà ad uscire dalle logiche di sfruttamento e prevaricazione. Comunque quasi imperdibile.

I don't know how to review this book. I cannot fairly review it as my own notion of the book is so altered by my own experiences, that I'm not sure anyone reading it would see what I see. Hell, to a certain extent, I know they can't... not quite the same at least.

Instead I will try to express how this book made me feel.

This book took me way too long to read. Not because it was bad, life just kept getting in my way even when I would much rather have been reading, that said, I was happy to take my time. This book transported me back to a different place. I've been to Vietnam multiple times, it's where my wife is from and it's one of the most beautiful countries I've ever seen. I don't like traveling much personally, and the flight there is long (over 24 hours counting layovers), but I always find it worth it when we go back.

This book took me back there at a much cheaper price. Vietnam has changed a lot in the 65 years since Greene wrote this book... but in so many way it is still the same. Reading it, I was reminded of hot nights in Saigon (where the temperature was almost always 90+ degrees and the occasional bursts of rain were always a relief despite how heavy the downpours got). I was reminded of the architecture, the clothing, the traffic and smells.

The plot is interesting, and one might be surprised to know it was written before America really got into the Vietnam war (Greene's insight into how America operated is sadly only too true), and the book comes off melancholic for multiple reasons which Greene did not necessarily intend at the time. This is one of those books that was no doubt very good when published, but honestly time has made better. It becomes both a good story and a sad warning about mistakes that were made, and how one should avoid them.

The prose is beautiful and much of the dialogue quite amusing. We have a delightfully sarcastic narrator, and many of the people he meets takes a similar cynical tone. My favorite bit of dialogue is when someone questions a reporter about a news briefing in Hanoi:

"There's a rumor that the Vietminh have broken into Phat Diem, burned the Cathedral, chased out the Bishop."

"They wouldn't tell us about that in Hanoi. That's not a victory."

Do I suggest the book? Absolutely. Even without the personal experiences, this is an extremely good book. For me though... it's going on my favorites shelf. 5/5 stars.

n  "He's a good chap in his way. Serious. Not one of those noisy bastards at the Continental. A quiet American," I summed him precisely up, as I might have said, "A blue lizard," "A white elephant."n

I decided against writing an analytic review for this because that would only showcase a nefarious ignorance of the tidbits of the Vietnam War. Most of my knowledge about the war has been derived from the likes of Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now. As sympathetic and morally ambiguous as much as those movies were, Kubrick and Coppola still were American filmmakers (I was going to include Forrest Gump but then decided against it). So my judgement can only be fair when it is focused on what I thought about the tale.

The author's national neutrality adds a sense of bird’s eye view to the events that unfold throughout the novel, even though the unfortunate direction where the third act of the flashback sequences leads us asks us quite a contradictory question: how long can one go on with conscience without picking sides, just because they want to play it safe.

n  “Sooner or later...one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.”n

However, our narrator is very much in the scene throughout most of the incidents, but his moral dynamics are portrayed in a very stoic way, and his unceasing denial of involvement sometimes reminds us of Hemingway's protagonist from A Farewell to Arms, considerably different though they are from each other.

What I most liked about the novel is how the main three characters are created and how many traits they were given despite the significant short length. Fowler is an openly toxic, hardened, cynical, morally ambivalent, yet agnostic atheist character, you are bound to dislike him at times, but at other times, you will be persuaded to share the same perspective with him.

n  “Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?”n

Phuong is hardly ever present or involved in the plot directly, but her character's delineation is proof of Greene's prowess in compaction, despite being slightly stereotypical. The most interesting of the lot, of course, is Pyle. I do not know how Greene managed to do it, to make us simultaneously make fun of him, hate him, yet sympathize with him. His is undoubtedly a weird culmination of traits, with a questionable notion of politics and women, textbook nerdiness and a very fidgety, squeaky-clean, whining personality. No, I do not think I can be accurate about what I exactly feel his character is like. Suffice it to say that he is a character we all have come across and maybe find likeable at first encounter, but try to avoid him as soon as we get to know them more.

n  “He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.”n

I will reread this again after learning a bit more about the war and the concerning politics. Not that it is needed to gather the essence of the novel (another of its beauty), but because then I can probably comprehend more of its importance from a political perspective.

While I did enjoyed the book, I was expecting more.

Earlier this year I was in Prague visiting a friend of mine. My personal circumstances haven’t been the best for the last twelve months and I had slipped into a state of deep depression without realising it. The purpose of this trip was to get away from everything, to drink a lot and lose myself in that beautiful city. One afternoon my friend and I were in a bar, six drinks deep and thrillingly relaxed. That is, until a group of Americans arrived. They took the table behind us, and began to fight for each other’s attention like a bunch of rambunctious puppies. ‘I hate them,’ my friend said quietly, and at first I thought he meant only this particular group, until he followed up with ‘fucking Americans, I can’t stand them.’ It wasn’t the first time I had heard someone dismiss an entire nation, but I was still surprised by this passionate outburst. Of course, I was aware of the stereotype of the brash and grossly impolite and uncultured American, but I had never really given it much thought, and, with ‘yanks’ being in short supply in Sheffield, I certainly hadn’t before heard such vitriol directed at them. ‘They’ve probably come over here to start a war,’ my friend seethed.

Since returning from Prague, and now particularly sensitive to it, I have come to realise that this negative stereotype is fairly common amongst the English, and this was at least partly the reason why I have been so interested in reading Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, The Quiet American. It is worth noting in this regard that the title itself could be interpreted as a sly form of mockery, in that it speaks with an element of surprise, as though a quiet American is a rare thing. The American in question is Alden Pyle, a young man with an ‘unused face’, who arrives in war-stricken Vietnam, seemingly as some kind of charity or aid worker, and quickly befriends an Englishman, Thomas Fowler, and his native girlfriend, Phuong. This triangle comes to dominate the novel, and has both political and personal repercussions.



The Quiet American is narrated by Fowler, and he describes Pyle numerous times as naïve and innocent. Moreover, the young man himself admits that he lacks experience, especially with women. In his early interactions with Phuong he is excessively polite. He pulls out her chair for her in a bar and, as they sit around a table, he objects to what he considers to be indiscreet conversation, the kind not suitable for a woman’s ears. It is clear that for Pyle women, or Vietnamese women at least, ought to be protected, that he sees them as delicate creatures or even almost as children. Indeed, he is disproportionately affected when one of his fellow countrymen visits a brothel. This man, Granger, is the archetypal loud American, a straight-talking, bullish and arrogant Philadelphian, with whom Fowler occasionally locks horns.

While it seems as though Pyle is a sweet, harmless, candid, heart-on-the-sleeve kind of guy, with his whole life ahead of him, Fowler is an ageing journalist with a developing paunch and a wife back in England. In contrast to his starry-eyed young friend, Fowler’s predominant attitude is a kind of disgruntled, world-weariness. Indeed, he claims to only want 18 year old Phuong in order to fight off the loneliness of old-age. To this end, the arrival of Pyle is the worst thing that could have happened to him, because his new friend falls in love with her and becomes intent on marrying her. Predictably, Pyle’s love for Phuong is idealistic, as is his approach to his rival. He claims that he wants to do the right and honourable thing, for example, he undergoes extreme danger in order to go to Fowler and reveal to him his feelings for the man’s girlfriend. Significantly, both in terms of understanding Pyle and the novel as a whole, Fowler asks him why he doesn’t just leave without telling Phuong about his love, why he doesn’t want to avoid causing trouble, and Pyle responds by saying that this wouldn’t be fair.

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

For Alden Pyle the consequences of his actions are less important than his intention. His intention is to do the right thing, and so if people get hurt that is simply an unfortunate, regrettable, but unavoidable form of collateral damage. What is paramount is that he acted in accordance with his principles. Fowler, on the other hand, understands that things are never that clear cut, that a good man trying to do good can, as a result, do bad things, can cause harm, which in this instance would be to hurt Fowler and possibly Phuong also. I found all this fascinating. One never doubts that Pyle is in earnest, that he is on the level, that he is a nice guy, he is simply “impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.” His character flaw is refusing to accept, or to see, the world as it is.

I wrote earlier about personal and political repercussions, and it is interesting, and satisfying, how Greene uses this love triangle to mirror the political situation in the country. Both Pyle and Fowler are outsiders, or invaders if you like, fighting over a Vietnamese, and while the American may be frequently described as innocent, the only real innocent in the situation is Phuong, who comes to represent the ordinary civilian during the war. Moreover, it is not surprising that Pyle brings the same attitude towards his job, which, we come to realise, is not as an aid worker, but a kind of terrorist working for the American government. Again, Pyle’s dangerous idealism, his naivety, means that he harms while trying to do good or he justifies harm in the name of what is good. The line between terrorist and liberator is, for him, not a thin one, it is clear and pronounced. Greene’s point appears to be that this is the American mind-set, that America wades into conflicts with the best intentions in the world, without comprehending the extent of the damage they are causing or likely to cause.

“Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.”

However, while I can see why he thought this, and I agree to an extent, I, ironically, think he was being too naive himself [unless of course I have misunderstood him]. In terms of individual soldiers, then, yes, I’ve met quite a few and they have all been absolutely convinced that what they are doing – in Iraq, Afghanistan etc – is entirely positive, that they are helping these poor downtrodden countries, that they are bringing democracy to them, and that this is a wonderful thing, even if they have to kill thousands of innocent people in order to do it. What I don’t accept is that the real people in power in America, the people who sanction these conflicts, who send these individuals into these countries, are like Pyle, I don’t buy that they are the Goofy, ‘aw shucks’ variety. I believe that the people who sanction war know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it. Power, greed, money, these are the things that drive foreign policy. Oh sure, we’ll get told that, for example, communism is a threat to world security, but the real threat it poses is to certain people’s bank balances; likewise, human rights violations are never the reason we engage. The American [and British] government don’t give a single, shiny fuck about human rights violations.



One further potential flaw with The Quiet American is that the friendship between the two men comes across as forced, certainly on Pyle’s side. He speaks about Fowler being his best friend, even though they have known each other for only a very short time. He compliments the man frequently and claims to understand him, to such an extent that it just does not ring true. However, this isn’t necessarily a failure of Greene’s, it could be justified in line with the book’s themes. Isn’t Pyle’s insistence that Fowler is a good man, that the men have bonded and are great friends, a sign of his immaturity? One could even argue that it is the arrogance of the American, one that believes that he can make friends so easily and can understand other people better than they understand themselves. In terms of Fowler, his affection makes sense. He appreciates Pyle’s wide-eyed approach to life, which is so different from his own; but he never considers them to be bosom buddies like Pyle does.

I’ve written a lot about Pyle in this review, and I do think that he is a wonderful creation, but, for me, it is through Fowler that Greene raises the most engaging and important question. As previously noted, he is in Vietnam to report on the war between the French and the Viet Mihn communist-nationalist revolutionaries. Fowler, according to himself, steadfastly refuses to take sides, going so far as to say that he has no opinions on what is happening in the country. As The Quiet American pushes on towards its moving conclusion, Greene asks ‘is it possible to not become involved? Can you watch people being killed and not have an opinion?’ This is something that I ask of people all the time, most recently with the refugee crisis. Can you remain neutral in the face of overwhelming suffering? I know I can’t. And neither, ultimately, can Fowler, who is forced to throw off his moral cowardice and act. I won’t reveal what he does, or the consequences of what he does, but it is worth noting that the decision to act is justified in almost exactly the same way that Pyle justifies his own actions, in that it involves the sacrifice of life for, the argument states, the greater good. Perhaps then the only thing one can say with any certainty where war is concerned is that there are no absolutes, no easy answers, it is, and will remain, a messy, horrible, horrifying state of affairs. Much like love, I guess.