Historical Fiction – War Drama
The Quiet American is a fictional novel set in Vietnam during the Indochina War (1946-1954), when French colonialists were fighting Viet Minh communists. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Just kidding. It was actually just the beginning of a long, tumultuous, and pretty terrible period for Vietnam, something that lends this novel a pretty dark and bleak historical context. Its characters are mostly the stuff of imagination, but the situations and settings were real (if slightly altered) events and places.
Like Thomas Fowler, the fictional narrator, Graham Greene himself was a foreign correspondent who stayed at the Hotel Continental featured in the novel.
With his fictional story set in real world events, Greene criticized what he saw as an ignorant and dangerous ideology behind American policy in Vietnam, but from the perspective of a man whose own attitude and motives are suspect.