Presage the well-intended but disastrous mess that we would make of theĮntire country in the decades to come. To sense that Vietnam was a tar baby that we idealistic Americans would Greene, writing well before we really got involved, seemed

The prescient pessimism that pervades this book is it's most interestingįeature. Asįowler loses Phuong to Pyle and Pyle's group begins a terror campaign,įowler finally abandons his neutrality and chooses sides, a choice madeĪll the more ambiguous because of his romantic rivalry with Pyle. Marriage and respectability and a life in America. Her little because his wife refuses to grant him a divorce, Pyle offers

Is a dangerous man because he is imposing his idealized vision on a group The journalist, Fowler,Ī cynical world-weary man of much wider experience, realizes that Pyle He has come to Vietnam to fosterĪ group that will adhere to this Third Way. That there is a Third Way for Vietnam, somewhere between Communism and He is convinced, based on his adherence to the writings of York Harding, Pyle is an innocent whoīelieves that others must surely share his ideals and pureness of motive. Of successes in the Phillipines (he was also the model for William Lederer'sĪnd Eugene Burdicks 'The Ugly American'). Who was sent to Viet Nam in the 50's to subvert the Vietminh after a string Lansdale, the renowned, or infamous depending on your politics, CIA operative The surface is an allegory for the whole experience of America in Vietnam.Īlden Pyle, the Quiet American of the title, was based on Col. Ostensibly the story of a love triangle involving a naive American spook,Ī jaded English journalist and a young Vietnamese girl, lurking just beneath This is an eerily prophetic and, therefore, deeply disturbing book.

The quiet american book review