Rating: 
Summary: burn the last copy
Review: Call it what you want -- "prophetic" even -- The Quiet American is still terrible. If we were to judge novels by how well they relate to the facts, we might as well read newspapers. Which makes me wonder why Greene didn't just simply write this as non-fiction -- instead of the disingenuous route he chose -- a trite story involving such simple, stick-like characters who are obvious stand-ins for their respective nations. Rather insulting. Besides, Greene's voice is dusty and worn out; I can't imagine what anyone sees in his style.
Rating: 
Summary: "Charley Owns The Night!"
Review: The "Quiet American" is set in mid-1950s colonial Vietnam. The author, a Brit, does an excellent job in setting the scene and characters. Virtually everything is appropriate to what must have been the time and place. Therein lies the diffficulty with the novel. While very well written, with sharp, cynical dialog, it is all too easy to read too much into "QA". There are all kinds of opportunities to behold allegorical references in Alden Pyle (the namesake),Vigot(the French detective), Fowler(the cynical Brit journalist) and especially Phoung, the young Saigon woman. Poor Phoung!! She and that sister will outlive us all. Armed with 20/20 historical hindsight, how easy it is to proclaim that "QA" is prophetic and prescient! If only LBJ had read it! Or Nixon!! This reviewer (and Vietnam vet) is a bit more cynical.The devil's advocate in me might state that Greene merely wrote a superior novel, set in Vietnam, but with nothing more added. Pyle, Phoung and the whole crew represent no one other than themselves. The story can stand quite capably on its' own two feet. with no "historical perspectives" required. The conflict between these views is the essence of "QA". I have to mention a classic line from the plot: "The French Army controlled the highways until 7PM. After that, they controlled the watch towers".That was Vietnam in a sentance. Every night our unit went back to our base camp, closed the gates and posted guys in the guard towers. Vietnam is a scary place after sundown and Charley (the Viet Cong or "Victor Charley") ran the place after dark. The headline is borrowed from my buddy, Jim Lydlle, the chaplain's assistant. Of the 2 opinions above, I prefer the latter. "QA" is not prophecy. It takes an American or a Frenchman to capture the essence of Indochina, just as I believe only Brits and Irishmen can write about Ireland. Readers wishing to appreciate the fascinating French Vietnamese period should pounce on "Street Without Joy" by the late Bernard Fall. The reader able to ignore all these constraints will enjoy "The Quiet American" on its'own merits. Too many constraints?. Welcome to Vietnam!
Rating:
Summary: Quite a completed plot
Review: Fowler, the narrator of the book, is a reporter from England in the Indochina War. He tells the story of Pyle, a young man who works for the American economical aid mission. He believes in democracy and has the American standard opinion that Vietnam needs neither the French colonialism nor Communism but a third force. He starts to work for the private army of general Thé, and is responsible for several bomb attacks in the center of Saigon, where many people, mainly women and children die. When Fowler realizes that his friend, who even saved his life once, is willingly to kill innocent people for his ideology, he agrees that some communists shoud kill him. Naturally there's also a love story, there is Phuong a young, beautiful Vietnamese lady. She first lives with Fowler who loves her very much, but later goes to Pyle who can offer her a marriage and a good future. That produces another tension between the two friends. During the whole book Fowler describes the duality of the country that is to say on the one hand it's beauty and special culture and on the other hand the terrible war that he gets to know in the north
Rating:
Summary: Uncertain
Review: Unfortunately I haven't quite finished reading the book but I've read the beginning and having read it I'm anxious to go on reading which I'll do this weekend. At the beginning there's an atmosphere of carelessness but still there is a certain tension and lots of things are unknown and thus maybe not understood. The author seems to be in trouble and he can't decide on things. but he seems to take it rather easy and he's not nervous about taking decision. At the beginning he doesn't get nervous when he gets into trouble but the fact of the war forces him to take decisions and to take a stand.
Rating: 
Summary: eerily prophetic
Review: This is an eerily prophetic and, therefore, deeply disturbing book. Ostensibly the story of a love triangle involving a naive American spook, a jaded English journalist and a young Vietnamese girl, lurking just beneath the surface is an allegory for the whole experience of America in Vietnam.Alden Pyle, the Quiet American of the title, was based on Col. Edward Lansdale, the renowned, or infamous depending on your politics, CIA operative who was sent to Viet Nam in the 50's to subvert the Vietminh after a string of successes in the Phillipines (he was also the model for William Lederer's and Eugene Burdicks "The Ugly American"). Pyle is an innocent who believes that others must surely share his ideals and pureness of motive. He is convinced, based on his adherence to the writings of York Harding, that there is a Third Way for Vietnam, somewhere between Communism and the corrupt colonial government. He has come to Vietnam to foster a group that will adhere to this Third Way. The journalist, Fowler, a cynical world-weary man of much wider experience, realizes that Pyle is a dangerous man because he is imposing his idealized vision on a group that is merely power hungry. Meanwhile, Pyle has fallen in love with Phuong, Fowler's Vietnamese girlfriend. And while Fowler can offer her little because his wife refuses to grant him a divorce, Pyle offers marriage and respectability and a life in America. As Fowler loses Phuong to Pyle and Pyle's group begins a terror campaign, Fowler finally abandons his neutrality and chooses sides, a choice made all the more ambiguous because of his romantic rivalry with Pyle. The prescient pessimism that pervades this book is it's most interesting feature. Greene, writing well before we really got involved, seemed to sense that Vietnam was a tar baby that we idealistic Americans would not be able to resist embracing. Pyle's bloody blundering seems to presage the well-intended but disastrous mess that we would make of the entire country in the decades to come. One wishes that men like Robert McNamara and the Kennedys had paid attention to this literate warning. GRADE: A
Rating:
Summary: I'm sorry, but it's not "great", after all!
Review: I've just been proofing the journal I kept in Vietnam in 1964. In the course of it, I mentioned the "great" Vietnam novel by Graham Greene. I wanted to check my memory of the watchtower sequence, so I fetched the book from the library and re-read it. Much to my surprise, with a distance of 40 years, I found that the plot-moving devices were a bit creaky, and the novel wasn't nearly as great as I had thought, or as is generally advertised. I suspect that one of the reasons people admire it is because of Greene's pervasive loathing of everything American: "I was tired of the whole pack of them with their private stores of Coca-Cola and their portable hospitals and their too wide cars and their not quite latest guns" (p.31). Oh yeah, all right, too bad about Americans and Coca-Cola. Forty years down the road, this strikes me as boring Euro-pique. There are nice bits about Vietnamese, French, and yes, Americans. But don't take it too seriously. It's a grudge novel.
Rating:
Summary: Naiveness and engagement
Review: 'The Quiet American' is a well-written novel about a love triangle set against the background of the French and American involvement in Vietnam. The narrative voice is that of Thomas Fowler, a disillusioned, middle-aged English correspondent with few professional and personal prospects who tries to keep at the margin of the incidents around him--or, as he says, who tries to report those incidents without taking sides--until he is comfronted with the dilemmas represented by Alden Pyle, a naive American who has learned politics only by reading books. Those dilemmas are, on the one hand, personal, and, on the other, political: Pyle takes away Phoung, Fowler's Vietnamese girlfriend, while at the same time is engaged in shady dealings with a dubious Vietnamese general to restore 'democracy' in the country and stop the 'spread of communism'. Should Fowler continue with his life of non-engagement and let Pyle get away with his girlfriend and the havoc he is wreaking among Vietnamese civilians with his monolithic political views? As one character in the novel says, 'one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.' And Fowler, after a senseless terrorist act in which Pyle is involved (although Pyle himself thinks that it was for 'the benefit of democracy'), is forced to act. The personal and the political merge in Fowler's difficult decision--but the reader is left uncomfortable as to what Fowler's ultimate motives are. The novel flows effortlessly from the first page to the last, both in its structure and in its prose. One often finds incisive comments and humor, and one cannot cease to be amazed at how prescient Greene's views are on the disastrous American involvement in Vietnam (the novel was written between 1952 and 1955). My only complaint about the novel is that Pyle's naiveness, although reflective of the American political position at the time, is almost caricaturesque at times, and thus detracts from his credibility as a character. Despite this, I thoroughly recommend it. It might even be an excellent tool in a political-science classroom.
Rating:
Summary: The most telling of Greene's best works..
Review: "..I wished there was someone to whom I could say that I was sorry." -- writes Fowler, our 'hero'. Like many of Greene's characters, he is tormented by sin and the need to repent. Unlike many of Greene's characters, though, Fowler can't believe there is a God (see the opening quote) and is all the more interesting because of it. Based on Greene's own experiences as a 50s-Vietnam War correspondent, this one is my personal favorite of his many great books.
Rating:
Summary: Innocence and Experience
Review: Greene's "The Quiet American" describes the brief, but astoundingly full relationship between Thomas Fowler, a British war correspondent-slash-expatriate, and Arden Pyle, an innocent and naive American desk soldier in 1950's Vietnam. The novel tells of how Pyle tries to usurp the affections of Phuong, a local woman from a tired, but comfortable relationship with Fowler. Simultaneously, Pyle is engaged in secretive dealings with a local thug in an attempt to drive French and Vietminh forces out of power - in an effort to establish a puppet government friendly to American interests. Graham Greene shows why he is one of the single greatest authors of the 20th century. His understanding of cultures and grasp of the current of his contemporary geopolitics is astounding from one novel to the next. In this light, "The Quiet American" is an interesting fictional look at Vietnam in the years preceding the Vietnam Conflict. The book is yet another of Greene's profound first-person confessionals in the manner of "The End of the Affair" and is well worth a read.
Rating: 
Summary: A Disappointment.
Review: I am a fan of Graham Greene; he is one of the few writers I have ever read who deals with issues of hope and dispair in real and honest terms. After reading works such as The Heart of the Matter and The Human Factor, I expected more of Greene than a shallow and naive allegory about America's involvement in Viet Nam. Greene is far more adept at revealing the frailties of the human heart than he is at reducing the complexities of world politics into individual characters. In The Quiet American, Greene tries to do both but succeeds at neither. Skip it.
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