In an interview on Southeast Asian Travel Literature

Why do you recommend The Quiet American by Graham Greene?

It’s a fantastic novel, which is set in Saigon in the early 1950s and foreshadows the Vietnam War. It’s particularly nice to read when you’re in Ho Chi Minh now because Greene describes the city extraordinarily well. It’s obviously set in a very different time, but many of the buildings he writes about can still be seen today.

The plot involves an embittered British journalist, Fowler, who is living in Saigon. Fowler, an opium addict, is in love with a young, beautiful Vietnamese woman called Phuong. Fowler then meets Pyle, ‘a quiet American’, and he initially feels an almost paternal instinct towards him. Later he realises that Pyle has fallen in love with Phuong and steals her away from him. Phuong wanted to marry Fowler but he couldn’t get a divorce from his Catholic wife. When Pyle makes all sorts of promises to marry Phuong and take her to the United States, Phuong accepts – before everything then changes. Fowler gradually realises that Pyle is in Vietnam as a passionate advocate of a ‘third force’, which then stirs up a local uprising to win the war. This involves tactics such as planting bombs in public places, which kills innocent people.

Fowler’s relationship with Phuong in particular is beautifully described and it’s a very careful and insightful portrait of the nature of some relationships between Western men and young Southeast Asian women, which still has much resonance today.

In an interview on Americans Abroad

The Quiet American. This is your only book written by a non-American about an Englishman and an American in Vietnam as the French colonialists are leaving. Let’s talk about the American character, Pyle. He starts off as an idealist and ends up a murderer. Was America’s presence in Vietnam motivated by idealism?

In the case of Pyle, he was Ivy League, innocent, believed that America was a force for good and should go out and do good in the world. As the French were reluctantly leaving Vietnam, he felt that someone had to go and pick up the white man’s burden and that could only be America as only America was pure and good. He then takes part in an assassination and a devious plot to plant bombs on bicycles whilst blaming the Vietminh.

This was written before the American war in Vietnam. Graham Greene saw it coming. And it was the idealism of liberals in America that led to the invasion of Vietnam by the armed forces. They should have read the book first and realised what they were doing. I think many of them did know what they were doing but they thought it was worth it. They were clearly wrong, for America and certainly for Vietnam.

What about the love triangle in the book, involving the Englishman Fowler, Pyle and a local Vietnamese girl, Phuong ?

It’s a very well-told story and it’s also the old empire and the new empire wooing the non-aligned, soon to be colonialist, world. The new empire seems at first to be more attractive than the old, but turns out to be every bit as vicious.

Does the English character realise his empire is coming to an end?

Very much so. The character’s only pleasure in life is no longer sex, it’s his opium pipe and going into oblivion, denying his existence and surviving on that. This is very much a view of England at that time. A country that had lost its empire and had to find a new mission. Now, unfortunately, it has found that mission in being the Gurkhas of the United States, but at that time it wasn’t clear where it was going. He very well represents what England was going through as it withdrew, as it turned over to an empire, a new American one which was consciously taking over from the French and British empires. The French and British very much looked down on them and felt they wouldn’t do as good a job as they had done. But, in fact, they did pretty much exactly what they had done, as all of them were very destructive.

So what is the fundamental error of colonialism?

That’s another subject and not really literary but I suppose its fundamental flaw lies in telling other people what to do in their own countries.