The Quiet American

By Graham Greene,

Book cover of The Quiet American

Book description

Graham Greene's classic exploration of love, innocence, and morality in Vietnam

"I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused," Graham Greene's narrator Fowler remarks of Alden Pyle, the eponymous "Quiet American" of what is perhaps the most controversial novel of his career. Pyle…

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Why read it?

12 authors picked The Quiet American as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Graham Greene is my all-time favorite author, and I could easily have filled this review with five of his books alone. He is the king of style and written dialogue.

The Quiet American–which was made into a pretty reasonable 2002 film starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser–concerns the life of jaded foreign correspondent and opium addict Thomas Fowler, caught in a love-hate relationship with his estranged wife, from whom he is seeking a divorce, and his young Vietnamese lover, Phuong. The action takes place in French Indochina on the cusp of the Vietnam War.

It is a masterwork of…

I find myself re-reading this book every few years. As someone who has visited Vietnam several times, I am particularly drawn to Greene’s vivid descriptions of the country in the early 1950s. The symbolism in the novel is not subtle: an older Brit and a younger American are rivals for the affection of a Vietnamese woman.

I find Greene’s depiction of Pyle, the American, to be especially striking: well-meaning but ultimately unaware of the damage he is doing to the country. 

Graham Greene is one of my favorite authors. His other books have stayed with me since I read them countless moons ago. Their observations and lessons feel urgently relevant today.

This past summer, I looked for an audiobook to distract me during my travels across the country. When I realized I’d never read Greene’s classic The Quiet American, I downloaded it to my iPhone, plugged into my Airpods, and clicked play.

Narrator Joseph Porter transported me to 1955 Vietnam. Through his journalist protagonist (alter ego?), Greene warned the United States to stay out of the Southeastern Asian conflict. He also…

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Kurtz by John Lawson III,

Annie Kurtz joins the Marines, deploys to Afghanistan, and has to make a split-second decision. She can follow her orders. Or she can follow her conscience. Nick Willard is a journalist who has pined for Annie since they were in prep school together. While doing his job, he discovers what…

Before the U.S. entered the war in Vietnam, Graham Greene forecast its disastrous consequences. His love triangle, set amid the escalating conflict, perfectly captures the naiveté of American interventionism overseas. I love the subtext of the tale, which is narrated by an embittered British journalist. Although it’s never spoken, we intuit that he is addicted to opium and living the life of a dissolute expatriate. Fowler watches in horror as a U.S. diplomat tries to steal both the woman and the country he has adopted. He claims impartiality and indifference until he cannot any longer.

From David's list on political crime fiction.

I was born during the Vietnam War. I have a dim memory of watching the evacuation of Saigon on TV. Some of my friends had older brothers, or uncles, or fathers who fought. We all knew the war was a mistake, a terrible miscalculation by “warmongers” and “imperialists.” What Graham Greene’s sad, gripping novel shows is how that mistake—which killed at least 1.3 million Vietnamese—wasn’t made despite America’s good intentions but because of them. The unshakable belief that America is a force for good in the world leads directly to the arrogance that got us into…

From Andrew's list on to make you rethink America.

Written in 1955 The Quiet American is probably the most well-known novel of the very few written in English about French Indochina and has been adapted twice to film, in 1958 and 2002. It is set in the last years of the French in Vietnam and the early days of American involvement. Graham Green apparently drew on his experience as a war correspondent for the French daily Le Figaro. The two main characters are Thomas Fowler, a cynical British journalist, and Alden Pyle, an idealistic American CIA agent with no experience in southeast Asia who is full of foreign…

From Mandaley's list on the French in Vietnam.

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The Oracle of Spring Garden Road by Norrin M. Ripsman,

The Oracle of Spring Garden Road explores the life and singular worldview of “Crazy Eddie,” a brilliant, highly-educated homeless man who panhandles in front of a downtown bank in a coastal town.

Eddie is a local enigma. Who is he? Where did he come from? What brought him to a…

I’m always fascinated by moral quandary, particularly in a morally ambivalent age where there are no clear-cut good guys or bad guys, only the lesser of evils. No black and white. Just shades of gray. And yet, to live a fully engaged life, we must make choices, because turning our back on it all is the worst choice of all.

In this controversial novel, the lead character’s dilemma is two-fold. Whose side is he on, and whether he should get involved. He’s a journalist covering a war, and journalists are supposed to be neutral observers. But he has strong feelings…

British journalist Thomas Fowler is living in Saigon and covering the conflict in Vietnam between the French colonial occupying power and the Viet Kong Communists. One day he meets Alden Pyle, an American intelligence operative attached to the American Embassy and the Quiet American of the story. While Fowler is a cynic, Pyle, who is new to Vietnam, is an idealist who wants to turn the country into an Asian version of American democracy.

Fowler acts as the story’s narrator, and the novel starts with Fowler discovering that the American has been murdered with the later chapters going back and…

From Tom's list on British spies.

I bought my only copy of The Quiet American from a scruffy boy on a street in Hanoi in the early 90s, when the Hanoi Hilton was still a dilapidated former POW prison, not a high rise. "Pirated" would be generous-- the book was a bound stack of poorly photocopied pages. But readable, so I did. Published in 1955, it was prescient about the absurd and tragic hole that America would dig for itself in Vietnam. And again, years down the line, it was echoed by the epic folly of America in Iraq and Afghanistan. Graham Greene's all-too-real masterpiece also…

From Victor's list on spy books set in Asia.

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Book cover of Hemingway's Goblet

Hemingway's Goblet by Dermot Ross,

Hemingway's Goblet is a rollicking read about a mismatched relationship between a middle-aged commitment-phobic university professor in London and one of his female students, a Korean 15 years younger than him. He is accused of sexually harassing her, but somehow their relationship survives as they join forces to seek to…

Set during the 1950s during what the French called The Indochina War, Greene’s classic novel never-the-less prophetically brings to life the attitudes that would lead to America’s war in Vietnam. 

Pyle, a bright young U.S. CIA agent posing as a foreign-service officer in charge of a medical aid program, falls in love with Phuong, the mistress of Fowler, a jaded British reporter who is covering the fighting between the French and the Viet Minh. In their fight for Phuong’s heart (or at least her body), the two men are meant to represent contending Western approaches to Vietnam.

Fowler feels the…

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Book cover of Kurtz

Kurtz by John Lawson III,

Annie Kurtz joins the Marines, deploys to Afghanistan, and has to make a split-second decision. She can follow her orders. Or she can follow her conscience. Nick Willard is a journalist who has pined for Annie since they were in prep school together. While doing his job, he discovers what…

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