December 2020: After some thought I decided to upgrade my rating to 5*. I've been praising this novel for some time and I do not understand why I only gave it 4stars.

This is a cautionary tale about the involvement of America and Britain in the French War in Vietnam. Reading this book was a great way to learn more about the First Indochina War.

The two main characters are symbols of the American and British participation in Vietnam. The British does not want to get involved in the war, and he is deluding himself that he is only an indifferent spectator.

Pyle, the American, represents the idealistic principles that the Americas brought in the Vietnam war and the lack of guilt for the damage they had created by their innocent causes.

"Innocence is a kind of insanity” “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.”

One of the conclusions of the books is that “Sooner or later...one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.” Another is somehow similar to the other book that I was reading in the same time, Blindness. It is about people's ignorance to human suffering, futility of life and the permanence of death.

This is the first book I read by Greene and it won't be the last. I enjoyed his subtle tone.

This was actually read for my university course. We were tasked to read a book (or watch a movie but...) and write a paper about how a journalist is presented in the.

Unfortunately, there was a blacklist as well and all the books I had in my mind were on it. So I had to look for a new one. And I am a bit angry that I did not know this book before! Graham Greene has a unique way how to tell a story and I really liked it.

“Death was far more certain than God.”

The most interesting was the difference between Fowler and Pyle. Fowler is cynical, he saw all of it, he has no illusions. Pyle is new, full of hopes, believing in pretty theories he read about. Pyle is naive to a point where he is delusional.

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

Graham Greene's The Quiet American offers a meditative portrait of imperial folly and misguided idealism. Thomas Fowler, an aging British journalist, observes the collapse of French Indochina while carrying on an affair with a young dancer named Phuong. His indolent existence receives a jolt when Alden Pyle, an idealistic young American "adviser," arrives with a dream of creating a free, democratic Vietnam free from French rule or communist domination. Pyle's brash naivety instantly raises Fowler's hackles, an impression further soured when Pyle falls in love with Phuong. Fowler soon divines Pyle's true intentions when he arranges a terrorist attack by a renegade nationalist he's seeking to establish as an alternative to the Viet Minh - marking himself less as a democratic reformer than a vanguard for American imperialism, masking ruthlessness beneath a chipper exterior. Greene's book bristles with his usual cynicism, with Fowler dispensing learned wisdom and sour apercus as he sizes up his unwitting comrade, while wondering about his own place in the ever-changing, postwar world. Greene views the Cold War as an extension of old imperial conflicts, with the United States simply a more boorish and self-deluding form of what France and England brought to Asia beforehand; rhetoric about democracy, progress and decolonization provide a cover for more cynical, self-serving motives. Pyle is an excellent character because he buys so thoroughly into his mission that he's willing to countenance any crimes on its behalf; yet he is less fanatical than a genial, fresh-faced bureaucrat. Certainly, Greene has no brief for the communist Viet Minh either, and from a modern perspective, one might regret that the book spends little time exploring how the Vietnamese feel about the war rending their country. Nor does Greene seem to recognize that his musings about a "Third Way" of governing postcolonial nations can seem paternalistic in its own right. But as an exploration of the hypocrisies and self-delusions of Cold War politics, the utter disregard of superpowers for the rights and wants of Third World nations (something prescient in 1955 and unfortunately still timely seven decades later), The Quiet American remains a classic. Adapted twice into films, a 1958 version with Michael Redgrave and Audie Murphy that makes Pyle the hero and the cynical Fowler a villain (supposedly under CIA pressure), and a more honest 2002 adaptation featuring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser.

This book was published in 1955. The first American killed by Viet Cong troops occurred over six years later. Something to remember.

* * * * * * *

This book is the Mona Lisa with mud splatters, a beautiful Maserati with its side crunched in. It was a great book, but could have been much better. Of course, Graham Greene wrote it, and so one cannot expect perfection. But this is by far the best book of his I've read -- in this book, Greene proves that he had a heart.

The author's mind was finely attuned to evil, and he makes a strong case that evil doesn't look like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (horrible for those involved, but the number is small) but instead like an economics seminar at Harvard. Large-scale evil exists in this world because influential people are so in love with their ideas that they ignore all facts that contradict them, and consider suffering (other people's suffering, of course) an acceptable price to pay in order for their ideas to be implemented. Greene, like many others, labels this tendency 'innocence':

This was my first instinct – to protect him. It never occurred to me there was greater need to protect myself. 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.

There is so much to admire in this book that I'll get the ugly stuff out of the way now. There is a love triangle involving a young Vietnamese woman, 18 years old at the book's start, whose function appears to be nattering on about celebrity magazines, filling opium pipes and peeling off her trousers on demand. Fair enough; wealthy men have done this when living in poor countries since time immemorial. But to fail to notice the clash between this activity and delivering impassioned speeches about the evils of colonialism were a little hard to take. And the fact that not one, but two highly educated men would fall desperately in love with such a person strains credibility. (There are very smart, very capable women in Vietnam. One need not settle for empty-headed teenagers.)

Greene also cannot resist tossing in several long, boring and completely pointless ruminations on Catholicism. And of course a few doses of completely unprompted racism: “Yellow voices sing and black voices gargle, while [our white voices] just speak.”

Ugly stuff out of the way, there were several reminders that, when he wanted to, Greene could write beautifully:

I have read so often of people’s thoughts in the moment of fear: Of God, or family, or a woman. I admire their control. I thought of nothing, not even the trap-door above me: I ceased, for those seconds, to exist: I was fear taken neat.

(Though even here, it's clear that his concept of 'people' does not include women.)

The political astuteness of the book is top-rate. Six years before the first casualty in Vietnam, Greene saw where we were headed, and delivered a tight, punchy warning against turning idealogues loose in Southeast Asia. It would have been tighter and punchier without the whole love triangle subplot, which was just a prop for our hero to talk about the human cost of stupid wars. I don't think the love triangle worked well (though it did allow him to toss in a great line: "You could sleep with a hundred women and still be a virgin"). He might have found a different method to deliver his central message, to wit:

“They don’t want Communism.”

“They want enough rice,” I said. “They don’t want to be shot at. They want one day to be the same as another. They don’t want our white skins around telling them what they want…In five hundred years there may be no New York or London, but they’ll be growing paddy (sic) in these fields, they’ll be carrying their produce to market on long poles wearing their pointed hats.”

He is wrong on the surface, of course -- Vietnam is increasingly an urban, manufacturing nation -- but somewhere in there, he has it right.

Set during the First Indochina War, The Quiet American is narrated by the cynical British journalist Thomas Fowler, who meets the young idealistic American agent Alden Pyle. The novel's larger conflict is centered on the French and American invasion of Vietnam, which is echoed microcosmically in the conflict that arises between Fowler and Pyle when they both fall in love with the same Vietnamese woman, Phuong.

I loved Greene's writing, which was sparse but filled with sharp observations and imagery:

n  “That was my first instinct -- to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was a greater need to protect myself. 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.”n

There is so much here that resonates regarding this novel's sociopolitical context (Greene's observations on the destructive nature of colonialism read as both historic and prescient, over 60 years after it was published), but it was the character work that I found the most arresting. Fowler and Pyle are both emblematic of their countries - Fowler is jaded but also delusional enough to have convinced himself of his own neutrality in the war; Pyle is brash, naive, well-meaning, and disruptive. Phuong's own character is rather anemically constructed, a source of frustration for the modern reader but probably a deliberate choice on Greene's part as Fowler and Pyle both project onto her, attempt to possess her, while barely able to communicate with her. Surprising and inevitable all at once, the trajectory of Pyle and Fowler's characters and the dynamic between them remains the singular point of intrigue throughout the novel, for those of us less interested in the military detail that obviously transfixed Greene. That said, if this is a historic period that interests you more than it does me, this is a must-read.

This was my first Graham Greene but it certainly won't be my last - I just found this so accomplished and well-constructed. The Quiet American is a subtle and affecting meditation on war and morality; it's a cautionary tale that was criticized upon its publication for being anti-American, and it's going to remain relevant until we finally listen to it.

وقتی این کتاب رو شروع کردم انتظار نداشتم انقدر برام جالب باشه. گرین تونسته توی یه کتاب نسبتا کوتاه ترکیبی از یک داستان عاشقانه و جنایی رو داشته باشه و از همه مهم‌تر به موضوع جنگ اول ویتنام بپردازه طوری که در عین خیالی بودن داستان، کاملا واقعی به نظر برسه.
داستان کتاب حول سه شخصیت راوی (خبرنگار انگلیسی)، پایل (آمریکایی آرام) و فوئونگ (دختر ویتنامی) در حوالی سال‌های ۱۹۵۰ در کشور ویتنام پرداخته میشه و در لایه‌های پایین‌تر میشه این افراد رو به عنوان نمادی از حکومت‌ها و نظام‌هاشون هم دونست یعنی قدرت استعماری پیر، قدرت استعماری جدید و مستعمره‌ی بی‌نوا. چون نمیخوام داستان لو بره بیشتر از این در مورد شخصیت‌ها و روابط‌شون با هم چیزی نمی‌نویسم.
گرین در چند جای این کتاب خیلی کوتاه ولی هنرمندانه صحنه‌هایی رو از جنگ توصیف میکنه که خوندنش بسیار دردناک هستش ولی انقدر قوی این کار رو انجام میده که باعث میشه یه جورایی حتی این کتاب رو جزو ادبیات جنگ هم بشه دسته بندی کرد.
از چیزهای دیگه‌ای که توی این کتاب خیلی دوست داشتم حاضرجوابی روای در موقعیت‌های مختلف بود. دیالوگ‌ها در بعضی مواقع خیلی هوشمندانه و ظریف انتخاب شدند طوری که موضوعاتی مثل دین، جنگ، فقر، امپریالیسم، کمونیسم و غیره از گزند کنایه‌های نویسنده در امان نیستند.
ترجمه کتاب هم خیلی خوب بود البته امیدوارم نشر خوارزمی یه فکری به حال حروفچینی و صفحه‌بندی‌ش بکنه

Reportedly, the genesis of The Quiet American was a happenstance encounter between author Graham Greene and a prattling, obnoxious, now-anonymous American aid-worker on a road trip from Ben Tre Provence to Saigon, Vietnam in the autumn of 1951. Greene's story is certainly rife with distain for virtually all of its American characters, none of which are particularly quiet, except a dead one. I got the impression that Greene's book title was itself a sarcastic stab, the irony being that the only quiet American is a dead American.

I came to Graham Greene the same way I came to Martin Amis, and Ian McEwan, and P.G. Wodehouse; all via the writings and inferences of the late, great Christopher Hitchens. Hitch has never let me down and Greene is quite possibly the best of them all (so far). This one hits on all cylinders: intrigue, love, espionage, revenge, and an ending that I found enormously satisfying.

In French Indochina in 1952, a disillusioned and cynical Englishman becomes the friend of an idealistic American—the second falls in love with the mistress of the first. Friendship, love, jealousy, politics, and espionage come together in a captivating story until the end. It is also a dotted description of the transfer of power that will take place two years later between the French and the Americans, who will bitterly learn that idealists do not mix well with warriors. As often with Graham Greene and many other British authors (John le Carré, for example), we can feel, through the two protagonists of the story, the feeling of attraction-repulsion that binds the British so strongly to those whom they name the "cousins" of America. It is always a delight to read this great writer.

3.5

I listened to the audio version of this read by Simon Cadell (who I only remember from Hi-deHi). He narrates it extremely well giving the perfect flavour of jaded but passionate, weary but belligerent English journalist facing having to return home and leave his Vietnamese girlfriend behind to a wife he no longer loves and who does not love him.

Fowler is the voice of wisdom and reason opposed to the idealistic Pyle who not only believes in his country's objectives in the war but also his love for Fowler's girlfriend. Pyle appears to be rash and a little stupid but his reasoning behind some of the things he is asked to do "for democracy" are horrific. Pyle manages to convince himself that any casualties are worth it if the Americans win. Fowler is disgusted with this attitude and vows to scupper Pyle's plans.

The subject of the war is touched on lightly and there isn't really enough of a book to really unpack the many issues thrown up by the Vietnam War. Greene hangs all the drama around the love triangle involving Fowler, Pyle and Phuong as it relates to the conflict. The book certainly draws some very stark lined between Pyle's idealism and Fowler's world weariness.

A clever book but not my favourite Greene.

I was pleasantly surprised how moving this story was and how strongly I warmed up to the humanity of the main character in the face of his generally detached outlook. Thomas Fowler is in a slump. As a British war correspondent working out of Saigon in French-occupied Vietnam, he gets a daily dose of duplicity and brutality in the world of ongoing guerilla conflict between the Viet Minh communist insurgents and French colonial forces. And then he comes home to play house with his Vietnamese mistress, Phuong, who is sweet and kindly prepares his opium for a nightly mental escape. Soon we come to believe that his love for Phuong is more than just selfish need. Both he and her mother would like there to be a marriage, but his estranged, Catholic wife back in London has refused to grant him a divorce. He dreads the inevitable day when he will be recalled to London for a higher position as a news editor.

Into this scenario comes a young American, Alden Pyle, who ostensibly works for the economic development division of the U.S. legation, but in reality is a CIA spook. He is genuinely friendly to Fowler, showing a homespun Yankee hospitality in is character. From social interactions, he has become attracted to Phuong. His morality of fairness and honesty leads him to confide his interest in wooing her. He is so naïve, the reader can only assume he is a virgin. Fowler can’t help liking him. He is torn between the threat of losing her and the reluctant recognition that Phuong would probably be better off with Pyle.

The narrative starts with this unstable situation and then alternates between Fowler reflecting back in time along various threads leading to the present and his perspective on events unfolding in the current time. As we would expect, the CIA is meddling. An academic political analyst has written a book with an idea that guides Pyle, namely that a solution for American interests requires nurturing and arming a third force among the Vietnamese as an alternative to the communists and pro-colonial sectors. This turns out to be a bumbling and dangerous strategy. The sense of decadent cynicism I saw in Fowler at the beginning is slowly replaced with great admiration for his human compassion. His actions in meeting his challenges shows a quiet bravery and a form of wisdom I think most can admire.

As Zadie Smith points out in her preface to the book edition I accessed after doing the audiobook version, the relationship between the three characters makes for a rich personal tale of conflicts in love and loyalty while at the same time playing out the relationship between the three countries in symbolic form. Both planes hold some element of doom arising from all the complication brought on by the divergent goals of their nations and cultural differences in personal vision and morality. We know that soon the Battle of Dien Bien Phu will lead to victory by the Viet Minh and shortly thereafter withdrawal by the French. And then a few more years later, manipulations by the CIA to develop a non-communist puppet regime will lead to a much bigger war. In the precarious phase of this tale, I agree on the brilliance Zadie Smith credits Greene with in painting such a moving story in simple grays, “the honest venality of Phuong, the disengagement of Fowler, the innocence of Pyle.”

Ultimately, what pleased me most was the book’s somehat paradoxical messages that seem prescient and modern for something written in 1955, obviously informed by Greene’s own experience as a correspondent there. Again Smith nails it that on the one hand, the blind idealism such as that which drove Pyle can lead to the evil of lives lost among the innocent, while on the other hand the fundamentally cynical view such as Fowler’s belief that ideas are not worth killing for can lead a person like him to intervene with committed actions.

My second by this author, I chose this because of its unique copyright (the 1950s) and location (Vietnam), just before the American intervention and all the political chaos that occupied my teenage mind (and continues to persist in my psyche and worldview). This author was panned by Christopher Hitchens, and they seem of a similar type, very british and honourable and proud of it. The protagonist, Fowler, is a middle aged expat, jaundiced, but convinced that he understands his concubine (the inscrutable Phuong). He encounters the naïve American, a caricature no doubt, but a fine straw man. I must credit the author, however, as Greene brings his lead character to doubt and self examination. Fowler is a journalist, and he takes his trade quite seriously, though personally he has given up on romantic love and coddles his intellect believing his Vietnamese live-in as a hard, loyal animal to be relied on completely as a pet. Of course he is wrong, and he comes to that, after a night of terror in which he is injured and the simplistic American saves his ass and then promptly steals his girl. Fowler even believes his nightly opium pipes, which Phuong lovingly prepares, sharpens his mind.

This is a story of empire, the French in Indochina and the English everywhere, dealing with the mysterious non-Occidentals in Saigon. The people, places, smells and architecture are rendered precisely, and at a time before the US invasion, so for me it was a journey into a place in time that is no more. This is important to me in fiction, and I read that Greene spent significant time in the locale, soaking it up and filtering in more or less honestly in his fiction. He writes well, and his characters are finely drawn and bring an intelligence and wisdom in their dialogue and thoughts. The character moves from journalistic neutrality to take a position against the American, and the humor goes out of the story (the simplistic American is called by Fowler only by his surname Pyle, and this American can’t but help of think of Gomer). Greene presages the whole American Vietnam war topic, apparently having a knack (or excellent instincts) for being in the right hotbed at the exact right time. I enjoyed this because the story is told and published before anything of the American intervention was truly conceived. Yet the tale predicts with uncanny perfection how it turned out many years hence. That’s a remarkable feat, and worth 5 stars.

This edition of the book had a most odd introduction by an un-named person: Basically it was highly critical of the motivations of the author, yet acknowledged the quality of the writing. It was a review of the negative reviews of the book (and somewhat of the positive ones): A strange item to include for a publisher who wants to sell copies. Here are a few snippets that caught my fancy:

p. 20, the way of the reporter: “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. My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action- even an opinion is a kind of action.”

p. 29, the treachery of naivette in an evil world: “That was my first instinct- to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was greater need to protect myself. 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”.

p. 36, the death wish and harsh cynicism of our protagonist: “From childhood I had never believed in permanence, 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. 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. The nightmare of a future with boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was sure to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.”

p. 113, a vision into the soul of an Indian man: “I was fond of Dominguez. Where other men carry their pride like a skin-disease on the surface, sensitive to the least touch, his pride was deeply hidden, and reduced to the smallest proportion possible, I think, for any human being. All that you encountered in daily contact with him was gentleness, humility and an absolute love of truth: you would have had to have been married to him to discover the pride. Perhaps truth and humility go together; so many lies come from our pride- in my profession a reporters pride, the desire to file a better story than the other man’s, and it was Dominguez who helped me not to care – to withstand all those telegrams from home asking why I had not covered so and so’s story or the report of someone else which I knew to be untrue.”

p. 143, the horrors of what is to come with US carpet bombing, nearly clarivoyant: “I smoked my first pipe. I tried not to think of all the pipes I had smoked at home. Trouin said ‘today’s affair- that is not the worst for someone like myself. Over the village they could have shot us down. Our risk was as great as theirs. What I detest is napalm bombing. From 3,000 feet, in safety’. He made a hopeless gesture. ‘You see the forest catching fire. God knows what you would see from the ground. The poor devils are burnt alive, the flames go over them like water. They are wet through with fire.’”

p. 167, the jaded view of our protagonist, an atheist alone and with little hope observing a saint: “I hit at a mosquito which came droning at my ear and saw Dominguez wince instinctively at my blow. ‘It’s alright Dominguez, I missed it’. He grinned miserably. He could not justify this reluctance to take life: after all he was a Christian- one of those who had learnt from Nero how to make human bodies into candles.”

In going over this, the second book by Greene I've read in two months, I can at least begin to say what I thought about this and why it did not leave such a positive impression with me, even though it's 'closer to home' in terms of my personal perspective and background.

On the one hand, Greene has this profound, abiding cynicism about the world and that bleeds over into his narrators. And while this book is about, or is supposed to be about, the dangers of military invasions and trampling all over other people, it's still a matter of subjectivity between Western speaking parts. It's still the cynical weary British journalist versus the brash American who steals his Vietnamese girlfriend. The Vietnamese girlfriend doesn't get much say at all and we don't get into her perspective. Vietnam is still a part of the background instead of the entirety of the setting, which I found more of in The Power and the Glory.

Well, Greene's at least thought about it. For both the 1950s and for today that's pretty good.