The Quiet American by Graham Greene. Short summary

5 seconds

One of the main characters is Thomas Fowler, a journalist from Great Britain. He is more than 50 years old. He watched the French war in Vietnam in the middle of the 20th century.

1 minute

One of the main characters is Thomas Fowler, a journalist from the United Kingdom. He has lived for more than half a century and has been actively covering the circumstances of the First Vietnam War for two years. What happens is his acquaintance with a young idealist from the United States, Alden Pyle.

The latter was an undercover CIA operative. He based his worldview on books on foreign policy authored by York Harding, who had no experience of the real events that took place in Indochina. Harding believed that neither colonial policies nor communist ideology were suitable for states like Vietnam. They needed a «third force.»

Pyle asks Fowler to tell him about the events of the last war in Southeast Asia to better understand the issue, but he does not like Fowler’s realism. Alden believed that the American authorities were the very «third force» that Vietnam needed.