The Quiet American
by Graham Greene
Summary
Thomas Fowler, a middle aged British journalist who has covered the French war against communist insurgents in Vietnam for years without much caring who wins it, meets Alden Pyle, a young, earnest American on a supposed economic mission who has fallen hard for a theory, borrowed from a writer named York Harding, that Vietnam needs a noncommunist, noncolonial Third Force to save it. Pyle also falls for Fowler's much younger Vietnamese lover, Phuong, and proposes marriage and security she cannot get from Fowler, who is trapped in a marriage his Catholic wife back in England will not let him dissolve. Fowler discovers that Pyle's Third Force is not theoretical at all: Pyle has been supplying plastic explosive to a renegade general staging bombings meant to look like Communist terrorism, including one in a crowded square that kills and maims ordinary civilians, children among them, while Pyle stands over the carnage worrying mainly about getting blood off his shoes. Sickened and finally willing to take a side, Fowler passes information that lets Vietnamese agents ambush and kill Pyle. Suspected but never charged by the French police inspector Vigot, Fowler gets his divorce at last, and Phuong returns to him, and the novel closes with Fowler alone with his conscience, wishing there existed someone he could say he was sorry to for what he has done.
Greene writes with the flat, watchful control of a reporter, and the novel reads as much like a political argument staged through character as like a conventional story, refusing easy sympathy for either Fowler's cynicism or Pyle's dangerous innocence; the ending's cold moral arithmetic, an assassination that saves nobody and solves nothing, is the point rather than a failure of the plot.
Greene drew directly on his own years as a war correspondent in French Indochina between 1951 and 1954, and later said the idea for a well meaning American secretly funding violence came to him on a drive from Ben Tre to Saigon with an actual American aid official who talked, in all apparent sincerity, about finding Vietnam a third force of its own.
Historical Context & Significance
William Heinemann published The Quiet American in December 1955, and it landed well in Britain but detonated in the United States on its 1956 publication there; critics accused Greene of putting an American bombing campaign in Pyle's hands and reading it as a blanket verdict on American foreign policy, and the New Yorker attacked its portrayal of Americans as murderers outright. No literary prize considered it, and Greene's own prizes, the Hawthornden for The Power and the Glory in 1941 and the James Tait Black for The Heart of the Matter in 1948, belonged to earlier books; his repeated Nobel nominations over the following decades never once converted into the prize itself.
Hollywood answered the controversy directly: Joseph Mankiewicz's 1958 film adaptation reversed the book's politics almost entirely, turning Pyle into the hero and Fowler into a Communist sympathizer's dupe, a change that led Greene to disown it as a propaganda film for America and a complete travesty. It took until 2002, and a cast led by Michael Caine, for a film to tell the story straight, and that version very nearly went unreleased at all, shelved for a year by a studio nervous about an anti American message reaching audiences right after September 11.