Review of: Greene, Graham. The Quiet American.

            An American aide liaison to the French colonial government, Alden Pyle, had come to Saigon to bring democracy to the Vietnamese. The story begins with his death. Who killed Pyle? Why? The 1955 novella The Quiet American by Graham Greene centers on answering these two questions. The narrator, a British journalist named Fowler, became involved in a love triangle through his girlfriend with the very awkward, chivalrous American. Around the theme of the love affairs, Greene incorporates the Indochina War between France and the communist-led Viet Minh nationalist. Set in 1952, The Quiet American prophecies the eventual failure of America’s idealistic efforts to save Southeast Asia from the “domino” effect of communist revolution.

            Pyle arrived in Vietnam as an idealist volunteer, influenced by academic and unrealistic assumptions about imperial French Indochina and life in general. As Fowler explains, Pyle became involved in an attempt to bring to power a military chieftain of a religious sect as a “Third Force”—not French, not communist—as a solution to the problem of colonialism and nationalism in post-World War II Vietnam. This aspect of the book has historical grounding, Graham even using a real general’s name: The. To raise the Third Force into power, Pyle engages in mass murder, a terrorist bombing that killed scores of civilian in Saigon. As the whole U.S. experience in Vietnam from 1945 to 1975 demonstrated, the means used did not honor the ends sought, and catastrophe resulted at high personal cost to Pyle, Fowler and all the ignorant assumptions of Western-centeredness in contact with the “real” world..