But Fowler’s motives for intervening are suspect, both to the police and himself, for Pyle has stolen Fowler’s beautiful Vietnamese mistress.

As young Pyle’s well-intentioned policies blunder into bloodshed, Fowler, a seasoned and cynical British reporter, finds it impossible to stand safely aside as an observer. Pyle is the brash young idealist sent out by Washington on a mysterious mission to Saigon, where the French Army struggles against the Vietminh guerrillas. Author: Graham Greene Genre: Fiction Topic: Psychological, Classics, War & Military, Thrillers / Espionage, Literary, Political Item. Narrated in the first person by journalist Thomas Fowler, the novel depicts the breakdown of French colonialism in Vietnam and early American involvement in the Vietnam War. “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. The Quiet American is a 1955 novel by English author Graham Greene.

Certainly I had read the book when it first came out in 1955, and on reading it once more in Saigon. “Written before the escalation of the Vietnam war this novel explores the impossiblity of being neutral in the early days of the Vietnam conflict.” ~RookReading Originally published in 1956 and twice adapted to film, The Quiet American remains a terrifiying and prescient portrait of innocence at large. When I first made a TV film about Vietnam, in 1969, the director asked me to quote from Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American I did, and later one of the TV critics wrote that I saw the country with a second-hand imagination.

Author of the quiet american