Book Review: The Quiet American by Graham Greene

The Quiet American by Graham Greene
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The eternal-triangle played out in the backdrop of the killing fields of Indo-China. The American involvement is beginning in this region with this “Quiet American” going about his clandestine business of imparting training and materiel to the underground rebel movement. The author’s description of various aspects of war makes graphic reading. Here is the deathly silence after a fiery conflict:

Everything was quiet, except for the flop and crackle of the burning stalls. I could hear a Senegalese sentry on the river’s edge shift his stance

A river of death

The canal was full of bodies: I am reminded now of an Irish stew containing too much meat. The bodies overlapped: one head, seal-grey, and anonymous as a convict with a shaven scalp, stuck up out of the water like a buoy. There was no blood: I suppose it had flowed away a long time ago. I have no idea how many there were: they must have been caught in a cross-fire…

The mind-numbing dreariness

So much of the war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn’t seem worth starting even a train of thought.

This book is supposed to have inspired le Carré’s inclusion of the Indo-china interlude in his Smiley trilogy.

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