The Quiet American

"Points out the dangers of well-intentioned interventions."

"It’s a fantastic novel, which is set in Saigon in the early 1950s and foreshadows the Vietnam War . It’s particularly nice to read when you’re in Ho Chi Minh now because Greene describes the city extraordinarily well. It’s obviously set in a very different time, but many of the buildings he writes about can still be seen today. The plot involves an embittered British journalist, Fowler, who is living in Saigon. Fowler, an opium addict, is in love with a young, beautiful Vietnamese woman called Phuong. Fowler then meets Pyle, ‘a quiet American’, and he initially feels an almost paternal instinct towards him. Later he realises that Pyle has fallen in love with Phuong and steals her away from him. Phuong wanted to marry Fowler but he couldn’t get a divorce from his Catholic wife. When Pyle makes all sorts of promises to marry Phuong and take her to the United States, Phuong accepts – before everything then changes. Fowler gradually realises that Pyle is in Vietnam as a passionate advocate of a ‘third force’, which then stirs up a local uprising to win the war. This involves tactics such as planting bombs in public places, which kills innocent people. Fowler’s relationship with Phuong in particular is beautifully described and it’s a very careful and insightful portrait of the nature of some relationships between Western men and young Southeast Asian women, which still has much resonance today."

"In the case of Pyle, he was Ivy League, innocent, believed that America was a force for good and should go out and do good in the world. As the French were reluctantly leaving Vietnam, he felt that someone had to go and pick up the white man’s burden and that could only be America as only America was pure and good. He then takes part in an assassination and a devious plot to plant bombs on bicycles whilst blaming the Vietminh. This was written before the American war in Vietnam . Graham Greene saw it coming. And it was the idealism of liberals in America that led to the invasion of Vietnam by the armed forces. They should have read the book first and realised what they were doing. I think many of them did know what they were doing but they thought it was worth it. They were clearly wrong, for America and certainly for Vietnam. It’s a very well-told story and it’s also the old empire and the new empire wooing the non-aligned, soon to be colonialist, world. The new empire seems at first to be more attractive than the old, but turns out to be every bit as vicious. Very much so. The character’s only pleasure in life is no longer sex, it’s his opium pipe and going into oblivion, denying his existence and surviving on that. This is very much a view of England at that time: a country that had lost its empire and had to find a new mission. Now, unfortunately, it has found that mission in being the Gurkhas of the United States, but at that time it wasn’t clear where it was going. He very well represents what England was going through as it withdrew, as it turned over to an empire, a new American one which was consciously taking over from the French and British empires. The French and British very much looked down on them and felt they wouldn’t do as good a job as they had done. But, in fact, they did pretty much exactly what they had done, as all of them were very destructive. That’s another subject and not really literary but I suppose its fundamental flaw lies in telling other people what to do in their own countries. August 16, 2012. Updated: September 3, 2024 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]"

"The Quiet American is much more about America than it is about Indo-China. The titular character is an idealistic young man in Indo-China, probably working for the CIA, whose well-meaning actions cause havoc. That is a sort of microcosm for what has actually happened in various parts of the world because of American intervention. The Dutch and the British colonial enterprise was largely a commercial one, or in both cases it certainly began as a commercial enterprise, by traders. But the American attitude towards the non-Western world, from the late 19th century onwards, has been of a different kind. The Americans of course see themselves as being on the side of the anti-imperialists, as they fought an anti-colonial war themselves with Britain. So they couldn’t think of themselves as imperialists, even if they were – specifically in the Philipinnes, which they ran as their own colony. But there has been a strong sense of misguided idealism. This is something to do with the missionary spirit, and the Americans have been very active in that sense. But it’s also to do with the way in which Americans see themselves as having a mission to bring their concept of freedom, equality and democracy to the rest of the world. That’s rather akin to France, and both are Western democracies born from revolution. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There are two conflicting tendencies. One is to see West and East as two totally different worlds – that they must all be different to us. But it’s equally a mistake to think that we’re all the same and share all the same values – that there is no distinction. The thing to get rid of first is the notion that there is such a thing as the East. Because there isn’t. The differences inside what is geographically Asia are vast, so there is no such thing as the East really. There are certain things that so-called Confucian cultures have in common, and other things that they don’t. There are certain things that the Muslim world has in common, but then again the differences between Iran, with its Persian tradition, and other Arabic nations are considerable. I think the idea of East and West has become defunct. You have to look at the world more closely. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I certainly think they’re less common than they were. The world has become smaller. For many people in their twenties, it has become a matter of course that they go to Asia for their holidays, or to work, or study. But different misconceptions occur, like the notion that the [success of the] Chinese model shows a kind of super efficiency on the side of the Chinese. Some people tend to idealise the Chinese model. The notion of oriental cruelty may not yet be completely dispelled. There are bound to still be misconceptions. Then again, there are clichés among European countries that are still at play. It’s about what happened when World War Two was over – about the consequences, and how a new world was created out of the ashes. The world that my generation grew up in is now rapidly coming to an end – I mean the institutions or ideals of a united Europe, the United Nations, the welfare state and so on. But it’s also about what happens when wars devastate societies, and how you put them together again. We’re never in an entirely new era. One of the fallacies of cataclysmic years is that somehow the whole world starts all over again from year zero – which is the title of the book and how 1945 was known in Germany, Stunde Null. But of course it’s never really Stunde Null, because you inherit a great deal from history. Some things change and others don’t."

"I love Graham Greene . He separated his work into either entertainments or serious novels. What I love about The Quiet American is that it collapses that divide, because it is both entertainment—a novel of intrigue and espionage—but also very serious. The novel is a bit Jules et Jim meets Bond or Bourne. It’s set in 1950s Saigon, during the French Indochina War and the build-up to the Vietnam War. At the time, Greene was living this slightly louche expat life out there as a journalist. The main character in The Quiet American, Fowler, is also a British journalist. Fowler is addicted to opium, morally corrupt, jaded and cynical. It’s a first-person novel and everything is told through the filter of this narrator. The quiet American is a CIA agent called Pyle. He’s a theorist of geopolitical life and engagement. He has this idea about ‘a third way,’ that there’s a line that can be steered between communism and capitalism, and we slowly realize that he’s every bit as much a radical and a militant as the Communists who are beginning to push back against the French. You realize that the novel is about the danger of trying to apply theory to the complexity and difficulty of real life. The Jules et Jim element of the book is that Fowler is involved with a local girl called Phuong, who is uncomfortably young compared to him. Pyle falls in love with her. Phuong is an interesting character who makes very clear-eyed decisions about her future and where it lies, both politically and personally. It is a fascinating novel from a moral standpoint. Everyone is corrupted, everyone is out for themselves but also has something in their soul that requires protecting. It is this idea of how we project our own selves, but also our political selves, onto the world. Phuong operates almost as a representative of the country she’s from, of Vietnam. One of the things that Greene is interrogating is the hypocrisy of the stated aims versus the real aims of what the Americans and the Brits and the French were trying to achieve in Vietnam. The novel was published in 1955. The Vietnam War had not happened yet, but it was very prescient—in terms of what it says about the dangers of military interventions or meddling, by the power of its vision of the geopolitical world, of the dangers of idealism, of dogma, of the expectation of a recognition of one’s own moral superiority. I was thinking about the threads that run through these novels and there’s a line in The Quiet American: “Sooner or later…One has to take sides if one is to remain human.” That line represents all of this, which is that you can only steer these nuanced paths for so long. Eventually, the pressures of events will make you choose."

"a book that gave me a shiver and a chuckle as I backpacked through Asia in the 1980s"

"Greene's prose was cooler and more economical than Nabokov's, but no less brilliant."

"Rereading Graham Greene's The Quiet American (as good as ever)."

"I was left with great admiration for the economy and assurance of the writing, as well as the depiction of how Americans and other outsiders meddle with a culture."