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A Bird's Eye View of 1950's French Colonial Vietnam

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The Quiet American by Graham Greene is about a British foreign correspondent on assignment in Vietnam. His assignment is to report the progress of the fighting between several groups who are trying to take control of the government and dismiss the French from their land. Fowler is a middle aged, opium addicted atheist in love with a young and beautiful Vietnamese orphan girl named Phuong with whom he cohabits.
Our third main character Pyle is American,young, introverted for the most part and up to "secret" stuff including stealing Phuong.
This is a classically written book from a great novelist. My original interest was in discovering what 1950s Vietnam looked like and I was not disappointed at all. It is an interesting plot with many turns and Mr. Greene's descriptions are detailed and captivating.
A most enjoyable book.

I was a reporter, I had no real opinions about anything

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So said the main character (and narrator) Fowler about himself in an attempt to thwart his promotion to the position of editor, away from the French war in Indo China, and his mistress Phuong.

And a true assessment of himself it may have been, if things had remained as they were. But once Pyle, the naïve, quiet American with his eye on the selfsame Phuong, and his dangerous political meddling enters the scene, Fowler ceases to be a mere spectator, and enters the real world of action with all that it entails. This, then, is the factual gist of, for me, Graham Greene's greatest novel.

It contains everything one has come to admire in Greene: an absolute economy of words, character developed through action and terse dialogue rather than descriptive language, all set within (what has seemingly become an unavoidable cliché when discussing his novels) an intriguing moral dilemma. So he breaks no new ground here, but rather perfects that which he does well to an exceptional degree.

And as always, nothing is ever simple. Ambiguities attach to everything we do, as Fowler discovers, when he does what he considers to be the expedient, just thing re the quiet American. Public and private morality dovetail in Pyle's fate, which Fowler suddenly can determine in one single act, which he does. So the world-weary Fowler ceases to be a mere reporter, and attains everything what he wanted in one fell swoop. And then, in a breathtaking turn-around the jaded, cynical observer Fowler is brought to this in the last sentence of the novel;

..but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry.

which, when I read it for the first time, carried me over the threshold of the Christian Faith, in the joyous realization that such a Someone does exist.

The Quiet American

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I had never read the book but reading it I remembered seeing the movie. The book is riviting, insightful and scary. There is so much said in so few pages. I can see where discussion of the book could be never ending.

I Read it while in Vietnam! What are the chances?

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I was in Vietnam for Vacation, and I came across this novel in a market store in Saigon. I remember there was a movie, but I had never seen it. I will have to say for a small little simplistic novel there was much to be enjoyed. The novel is narrated by Fowler, the British "OLDER" reporter who loves the space and madness occurring in 1950' Vietnam. Fowler is met by Pyle, an American on humanitarian mission to feed the war ravaged citizens of Vietnam. Pyle admits that he is in love with Fowler's Asian Girl friend and would like to steal her away. From this point on Greene continues the playful bantering back and forth between these two characters, but the novel soon becomes dark and more sinister as we learn these characters' deep dark secrets, they are not what they seem. Graham Greene has created an enjoyable novel that amounted to a love story, adventure story and Mystery all in this nicely written novel. I liked The Quiet American.

Leaves you with a good bad taste

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Re-reading this book, it actually seems better than when I first read it a few years ago. Graham Greene was probably the best-ever writer of certain kinds of book about disaffected characters in actual historical and geographical situations. Many have written about the fact that the lead character, Thomas Fowler, embodied many characteristics of Greene himself, and the amazing thing about this is that Greene makes the character so unpleasant.
The writing is magnificent. Greene was a supremely economical writer who could create a mood or an impression in fewer words than anyone else I know. He was also a master of irony, and makes much of the fact that Pyle, the quiet American of the title, was actually more dangerous because of his innocence and basic goodness.
The Quiet American also fills a prophetic role, as we can look back on the many noisy Americans who arrived in Vietnam after the time of this fictional quiet one and amply justified Greene's feeling that they would make a great mess of things.
The other thing that struck me was the faithfulness of Philip Noyce's movie to the text. Many things that I thought the movie had created or changed completely were simply changes of emphasis or dramatisations of things that were too vague or abstract for the screen. Even the changes in Pyle's character were simply attempted clarifications of aspects that were ambiguous in the book - which ironically had the effect of making his character even more ambiguous.