The Quiet American - Graham Greene

Graham Greene is an author whose works explore religion, politics and morals within the modern world. Greene was a convert to Catholicism which provided a lot of material for his literary works. He suffered from bi-polar disorder and later abandoned his wife, whilst never divorcing due to religion. He was also recruited into MI6 by his sister due to his frequent travels and worked as an agent in Sierra Leone during WWII. The prominence of religion and Catholicism in Greene's work began to wane in his later years to be replaced with a humanistic approach. He attacks America's imperialistic attitude in later works and "The Quiet American" criticises ...  Read the complete review

This is the patent age of new inventions For killing bodies, and for saving souls All propagated with the best intentions Byron I first came across The Quiet American in my Chinese girlfriend's bookcase, its spine bound in Penguin orange. Watercolour flames were roaring on the front cover and a man quietly watched the burning tropical forest. The story begins on a sweltering dangerous evening in Saigon, in a dingy apartment on the rue Catinat. In the north, the colonial French are bogged down in a bloody guerrilla war with the Communists, but here as yet, only the occasional grenade or sly factional murder disturbs the ...  Read the complete review

Set in the last years of French Indo-China (Vietnam), this is a story of dangerous idealism and betrayal. Graham Greene's tired narrator, an English journalist, encounters a naïve American, Pyle, whose dangerous enthusiasms draw them into the conflict. A generation before the American experience in Vietnam, it foreshadows the terrible price of commitment and intervention. The narrator has much in common with Greene's characters from other books. Tired, cynical and middle-aged, he is content to seek his own peace amid the conflict. But this complacency is shaken on meeting the young, idealistic Pyle, working as a liaison from the US embassy. This quiet ...  Read the complete review

This book will lull you into a detached necessity to read...... Excellent, forlorn thoughts and observations from ex-pat reporter in troubled Vietnam..... Decadent, empty, lonely and cynical feelings articulated towards the age gap..... His wisdom of perspective sees through and past the idealism of the young American Pyle....a part of his own self that is lost and that he is responsible ultimately for murdering....... His woman is dependent upon him, a fickle sense of need....and he is naturally afraid of losing her to a younger man who will bring him loneliness. This is the truth behind Desire and ...  Read the complete review