The Quiet American

"I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."

"Innocence is a kind of insanity." Both quotes from "The Quiet American" by Graham Greene


Just finished Graham Greene's "The Quiet American" and watched the movie (props to Netflix, how did we ever live without it?) with Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser. It's a great read -- suspenseful and filled with Greene's complex moral view. It's also a timely read -- many of the problems Greene identified at the time with French colonialism and American interventionism in Viet Nam read as a "How Not To" that was prescient concerning America's problems and eventual withdrawal in Viet Nam. The book was blasted as anti-American by a number of American critics -- given hindsight, it appears that this was so because while fiction, the book hit pretty close to the mark and seems to have evidenced a greater understanding of the culture and politics of (becoming) post-colonial Viet Nam than the U.S. either possessed or dismissed.

Book's better than the movie -- the movie makes Alden Pyle, the "Quiet American", more of a seasoned CIA operative than the book suggests -- but isn't the book almost always better?