Couched in a tale of romance and friendship, The Quiet American is a political parable, an assured explanation of history but also a warning to take heed in the future. What is underscored emphatically in the novel is that the act of writing is a political one. This is an emblematic, imperialistic love triangle the struggle for the woman is meant to represent the struggle for Vietnam.

I took no action-even an opinion is a kind of action.' Between Fowler and Pyle comes the young Vietnamese woman, Phuong. By the end of the novel, we learn that Pyle's American optimism has been his undoing but equally dangerous is Fowler's feigned journalistic distance - 'I preferred the title of reporter. The novel is written from the point of view of a jaded British foreign correspondent and Saigon resident, Thomas Fowler and chronicles his relationship with American diplomat, Alden Pyle, who arrives in Vietnam full of the idealism of democracy, intent on teaching a foreign nation a better way of doing things that is, the American way. The novel - set in 1950s Vietnam, is carefully balanced by the weight of the authority of an author who worked as a correspondent in Vietnam between 1951-1954. Graham Greenes novel The Quiet American (1955) is set during the Vietnam War in the early to mid-1950s, not long before the defeat of the French colonial. Thomas Fowler, a middle-aged English reporter, lives in Saigon with his ex-lover, Phuong Hei. It marks Graham Greene as one of the greatest journalists of his generation. brilliantly constructed novel of love and chaos in 1950s Vietnam (Zadie Smith, The Guardian). The Quiet American Summary Next Part 1, Chapter 1 We begin in Vietnam in the 1950s, at the height of the tension between French colonialism and local Vietnamese Communism. The Quiet American is an important novel essentially, it is a love story but it is also a scathing critique of US meddling in the internal affairs of nations and people it knows nothing about.

Quiet american by graham greene