![]() The novel takes place in Vietnam when colonial power France was fighting communist-led forces from the country's north. You have to get past that to recognize also what a wonderfully written novel The Quiet American is-as well as, perhaps, where Greene went wrong. foreign policy and military power were still widely seen as forces to make the world safe for democracy, here was a slender novel that predicted and explained the quagmire America was about to find itself in.Īt least, that's the way it seems for anyone who reads the book in the years since the bloody Southeast Asian debacle of the sixties and seventies. In the 1950s, when Vietnam wasn't yet on the radar for most Western readers, when U.S. ![]() The biggest obstacle to properly appreciating The Quiet American is getting past Graham Greene's uncanny political prescience. ![]() CRITIQUE The unquiet Brit and the Americans ![]()
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