Graham Greene's The Quiet American: Watch Out For Those Quiet Ones!

Maybe you know this already, but people who disarm (or annoy) you with their quiet, innocent, polite ways may be the most dangerous kind of people you meet. If that doesn’t make sense to you, I’ll give you an example with the astute help of Graham Greene, author of The Quiet American, but even if it does, please indulge me. His story takes place in the early 50s in Vietnam, when France was fighting the North Vietnamese and America wasn’t yet too involved. Our narrator, Thomas Fowler, is a British, middle-aged reporter (not one with opinions, thank you) in Saigon, living with a young and pretty Vietnamese woman who prepares his opium pipes and hopes that someday his wife in England will grant him a divorce. He meets the young American, Alden Pyle, who appears quiet to everybody he meets in the story.

From the first chapter we know that Pyle is murdered and Fowler becomes a police suspect, for, as we discover from Fowler’s description of the events that led up to Pyle’s demise, the quiet man steals Fowler’s girl from him with a proposal of marriage and dangling images of the wondrous life she’d enjoy in America. This is not the only dangerous thing about Pyle. He arrives in Vietnam with the eagerness of a schoolboy, ready and armed to combat communism with ideas out of books by his favorite author.

There is no talking him out of his dangerous ideas that eventually kill and maim many innocent people on the streets. Fowler finds out too late what he’s doing, but survives to reprimand him. Do you think Fowler is holding back on us and is Pyle’s killer? We really don’t know because he himself seems confused about his feelings for Pyle, who sincerely likes and looks up to him. Pyle is such a nice, well-mannered man that we also are confused about our feelings for him. Is he really doing bad things, playing with plastic like it’s a toy?

Greene has created wonderfully real characters to draw us into this short book (249 pages in my little book). Fowler takes us on an adventure behind enemy lines when he and Pyle run out of gas and Pyle ends up rescuing him after he’s injured. He also shows us the devastation of war when he is invited on a mission to Phat Diem.

He reflectively writes:

I wished I’d never heard the rumor about Phat Diem, or that the rumor had dealt with any other town in the North where my friendship with a French naval officer would allow me to slip in, uncensored, uncontrolled. A newspaper scoop? Not in those days, when all the world wanted to read about was Korea. A chance of death? Why should I want to die when Phuong slept with me every night? But I knew the answer to that question…

The beauty of The Quiet American is that the story keeps us in suspense. How will Pyle be murdered? And who kills him? Is Pyle really dangerous and out of control or is it Fowler out of control and jealous? Or is Fowler protecting the innocent, including Phuong, from a man with big, unsound ideas?

The characters, some I haven't mentioned, are definitely not cut and dried. Fowler is pretty selfish in his attitude towards Phuong and doesn’t tell her the truth about his wife or his job when it would mean she would leave him. I still could understand why he lied and I liked him. He did hate the war and didn’t want more people to be killed, which cannot be said about Pyle. Pyle, for his part, enjoys talking with Fowler and isn't as quiet as Fowler would hope he'd be (the talks get intimate to his embarrassment). This makes the book a fascinating read that helps us to comprehend how America became so involved in Vietnam. Not all of the Pyles would be murdered.

The Quiet American may be a short read, but not an easy one you can just read and forget about it. It's one you'll think about. A little confusing is how Fowler switches from the present to the past, and occasional French talk when you don’t know the language well, but that only keeps the readers on their toes. I enjoyed the slight challenge, although footnotes would’ve been helpful. Other editions probably include them.

Having seen the movie with Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, I pictured the characters of Fowler and Pyle as the actors, but I can’t remember if the endings were exactly the same. I do know I liked the movie a lot. If you have, you should be happy with Greene’s novel as well.