Book summary

Set in Vietnam in the 1950s, during the last days of French colonial rule, THE QUIET AMERICAN was based partly on Graham Greene's own experiences in Vietnam as a correspondent for the London Times. The book's narrator is an English journalist named Fowler who lives in Saigon with his Vietnamese mistress, Phuong, but is unable to convince his Catholic wife to grant him a divorce. Fowler meets Pyle, a young American intelligence agent who talks of setting up a "third force" to oppose both the colonial powers and the Communist rebels. Fowler's growing conviction that Pyle is orchestrating a campaign of terror coincides with the discovery that Phuong has betrayed him with Pyle. When THE QUIET AMERICAN was published in the US in 1956, its implication that Americans were involved in terrorism against the Vietnamese was met with outrage. As years have passed, however, the book has come to be seen as a prescient and probing look at a volatile situation that paved the way for America's tragic involvement in the Vietnam War.

Media reviews

"A continuously intriguing piece of storytelling....[Greene] has brought into vivid relief a universal human problem--the fearful price of innocence--and has shown that behind innocence there lurk unconscious arrogance and a self-righteous streak of moral blindness."