THE QUIET AMERICAN by Graham Greene

 Finished Th 6/17/21

This is one of my ancient trade paperbacks and there is no date of purchase.

Last week I watched a documentary about Graham Greene and I was looking for 'THE POWER AND THE GLORY', and I couldn't find that novel but located this one. 

Graham Greene actually worked for MI-6 in the 50's and his boss was the infamous, Kim Philby.

The novel is set in Vietnam of the 1950's.

Thomas Fowler- an English 'reporter, not a columnist'..."Just The Facts, No Perspectives". He is married, but has a girlfriend, Phuong who was a 'dancer' in one of the clubs. Fowler smokes opium through most of the novel, but doesn't seem impaired in any way.  

Alden Pyle is an overly eager and 'patriotic' American. He knows nothing of the real country of Vietnam, but he gets all of his information from books from a particular historian. 

It's a 'three way' love triangle set in a country that's involved in a civil war. 

It's really Terrorism before the term was invented. 

From NPR:

"The Quiet American, by Graham Greene, was written in 1955 and set in Vietnam, then the site of a rising local insurgency against French colonial rule. In its brilliant braiding together of a political and a romantic tangle, its characters serve as emblems of the American, European and Asian way, and yet ache and tremble as ordinary human beings do. It also is a typically Greenian prophecy of what would happen 10 years later when U.S. troops would arrive, determined to teach a rich and complex place the latest theories of Harvard Square. Lyrical, enchanted descriptions of rice paddies, languorous opium dens and even slightly sinister Buddhist political groups are a lantered backdrop to a tale of irony and betrayal."

I liked the book and would read more by Greene.