And if you think about Iraq, Afghanistan, elsewhere, you see the outline of the same story. Certainly it's true that if you walk through modern Saigon, as I have done, you can see Greene's romantic triangle playing out in every other hotel.
Lyrical, enchanted descriptions of rice paddies, languorous opium dens and even slightly sinister Buddhist political groups are a lantered backdrop to a tale of irony and betrayal.īut that's not why I keep reading and rereading The Quiet American, like many of Greene's books, and have it always with me in my carry-on, a private bible. troops would arrive, determined to teach a rich and complex place the latest theories of Harvard Square. It also is a typically Greenian prophecy of what would happen 10 years later when U.S.
In its brilliant braiding together of a political and a romantic tangle, its characters serve as emblems of the American, European and Asian way, and yet ache and tremble as ordinary human beings do. The Quiet American, by Graham Greene, was written in 1955 and set in Vietnam, then the site of a rising local insurgency against French colonial rule.
And between them shimmers a young local woman who seems ready to listen to either suitor, and certain to get the better of both. An Englishman awaits him there, protecting himself against such foolishness by claiming to care about nothing at all. Opinion Pico Iyer Commemorates the Centennial of Graham Greene's BirthĪn American comes into a foreign place full of ideas of democracy and how he will teach an ancient culture a better - in fact, an American - way of doing things.
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