Pyle horrified me as often as I pitied him for his rigid world view. Even when he’s confronted with evidence that the situation in Vietnam is complicated and that his version of Democracy is just a different flavor of colonialism, Pyle refuses to learn. He’s been taught that Democracy is the ideal and the Communism is evil. If asked, I don’t know that Pyle would be able to give clear definitions of either. Pyle comes straight from Boston, armed with books by armchair political theorists who tell him that Democracy is something everyone should have, especially when Communism is lurking about. I’m comfortable with his blasé view of the political and social landscape. I’ve met cynical, detached-but-sensitive characters like Fowler before. Pyle decides, after one meeting, that he is in love with Phuong and is determined to marry her. It’s hard to say for sure.) The arrival of American Alden Pyle throws Fowler’s carefully maintained status quo off its axis. The French regime is beginning to crumble around him, but Fowler isn’t worried about much. His job is not difficult, as much of what he writes is delivered and press conferences and anything controversial is censored before it leaves the country. He has a mistress, Phuong, who cares for his needs. Thomas Fowler has been in the city for two years, working as a reporter for a British newspaper.

The Quiet American is set in the mid-1950s in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), when the French were still fighting to hang on to their colony and Americans were just barely getting involved in the escalating conflict. It is also the story of a man wrestling with his conscience and his long commitment to neutrality, which is harder to maintain as conditions grow more violent. The woman rarely gets to speak while the two men debate what’s best for her and her country in either deep cynicism (the Briton) or naive idealism (the American). In this brief, devastating novel, two men-one British and one American-fight for the affections of a Vietnamese woman without really considering her wishes or feelings.

Graham Greene’s masterly novel, The Quiet American, is the kind of novel that I find impossible not to read as an allegory.

The Quiet American by Graham Greene