The Quiet American is a novel by Graham Greene, published in 1955, based on his experience as a war correspondent for the Times and Le Figaro.

British journalist Thomas Fowler has spent a few years in 1950s Saigon, reporting on the tangled mess of unravelling French colonial rule in Indochina. The story opens with some naive whippersnapper entering Fowler’s jaded, but oddly settled existence. Alden Pyle – young, American, Ivy League – turns up, apparently with all the answers to Vietnam’s problems. Pyle might lack practical experience, but he has read a book about foreign policy, and decides this qualifies him to wade into the morass of France’s struggle against various groups of Vietnamese resistance fighters, who also fight amongst themselves. Pyle’s plan is to direct American support to one of the Vietnamese factions, supposedly sympathetic to Western values, and allow this group to take over.

Fowler, meanwhile, is an observer, neutral, not taking sides, because that’s how a writer remains objective. A clergyman tells Fowler at one point, referring to his church:

“We are neutral here. This is God’s territory.”

This suggests that God and a weary British journalist have something in common. Fowler, however, thinks that maybe God should give up his position above it all and pick a side, preferably the side of scared, hungry people who take shelter in the church hoping to escape the fighting. Fowler, lacking Godly qualities, finds it increasingly difficult to stand idly by, as Pyle funnels resources towards a lawless, brutal warlord.

Fowler, the dispassionate writer is eventually forced to come down from his ivory tower, figuratively, and literally actually, since there is a tower in the book, a watch tower where he gets marooned with Pyle, when their car breaks down. The tower is attacked by the Vietnamese and collapses. Fowler finds himself back down on the ground, with a broken leg. This is where he, like all of us, has to make his imperfect judgements.

People are not omniscient. They are involved and subjective. Maybe we should conclude with the sort of religious metaphor characteristic of the book. People are perhaps in the position of Abraham in Genesis, when he tells God that some local perspective is lacking in the big picture judgement of the situation in Sodom and Gomorrah. Before raining down fire, brimstone and napalm for the greater good, there are a few decent people in those cities who should be considered along with all the rest. Don’t kill the innocent along with the guilty – and is it so easy to divide guilt from innocence anyway? Abraham presents the wisdom of his limited view to a superpower claiming to know everything. The Quiet American does the same. The difference, I suppose, is that God to an extent listens to Abraham, Pyle doesn’t listen to Fowler.