The Quiet American (The Viking critical library) [Paperback]

TQA itself a wonderful book that,to an American, probes at our treasured notion high-minded idealism and our "can-do" spirit that has served us well at times and not so well at others. Greene's symbolism is telling and insightful, given that it was published well before the United States' full-blown involvement in that region of the world. While Greene relates many things that he experienced or felt in Indochina as a journalist, the book is not solely a "war novel". TQA, like many of Greene's books, takes the readers on the author's journey of personal morality and matters religious.

Graham Greene's novel of Pyle, the "quiet American", employed by a barely-disguised fronting organisation of the CIA, narrated by Fowler, a British journalist who comes across by turns as weary and worldly, is immensely interesting. In it, Greene offers up perhaps his most incisive and insightful political commentary, treating the danger of allowing people guided solely by ideology and schools of academic thought to be responsible for intelligence fieldwork. Pyle, a graduate of Harvard, goes into Indochina, believing intensely in the necessity of enabling a "third column", General The's men, and employing them as an American proxy force.

Whether or not Pyle himself sees the implicit incompatibility of this abstract idea and reality is never quite clear: certainly Pyle plays witness to the destruction that his attempts to mobilise a third column bring about. He is not subject, though, to the gross revulsion at the wanton destruction of life that Fowler is. Equally certainly, Pyle's political views cost him his life: open to question, still, is whether or not Pyle himself was ever conscious of his fallacies, or if he remains blinded throughout. Rather than being a novel of a man's moral revelations, or telling of his relationship with the Divine, "The Quiet American" is far more a parable.

Greene's structure, his combined simplicity and complexity, and the thematic relevance of this novel, render it a deserving read. Additionally, the chronologies and commentaries upon foreign involvement in Indochina/Vietnam are both valuable and blessedly concise, and the collected reviews and critcal commentaries upon the novel serve as valuable tool for understanding.

Talk about foreshadowing. Greene writes and makes a strong case against American involvement in Vietnam. And he makes this case back in the 1950's towards the end of French involvement in Indochina.

The book is well written and easy to read. The story is not dated at all. I only wish President Kennedy and LBJ and their advisors had looked at this book... the books message was all too true.

The Viking critical edition comes with some awesome extra stuff including works about and by Greene, great primary sources on Vietnam, and some great background info.

As a movie buff, I enjoyed some of the writings that compared the book and the movie.

This is a book that deserves the title of classic.