In Graham Greene's (1904-91) The Quiet American (1955), the narrator is Thomas Fowler, an English journalist covering the war in Saigon. There he meets the American Alden Pyle, who has just arrived in Vietnam as an official of a program supposedly designed to benefit the victims of the war. But Pyle exhibits a dangerous innocence: "He was determined . . . to do good, not to any individual person, but to a country, a continent, a world." Complicating their relationship further, Pyle falls in love with Fowler's Vietnamese mistress, Phuong, promising to marry her and bring her back to the United States. Phuong accepts his proposal and moves in with him. The political parallel is clear to the always confident Pyle: The Americans will win, in war as well as love, in Southeast Asia, where the older colonial powers, Britain and France, have failed, because America comes "with clean hands" and the best intentions.

Pyle sees the solution in arming a "third force," an independent anticommunist private army of General The. As a result, he becomes involved in supplying The's army with weapons that cause the death of Vietnamese citizens. Convinced that Pyle is a menace, all the more dangerous because he is acting out of good intentions, Fowler reveals information that leads to Pyle's death.

Fowler has become another Pyle: doing something evil for a good motive. Fowler and Pyle are mirror images of each other. At the conclusion, Fowler is reunited with Phuong, whom he plans to marry. The last words of the novel are Fowler's: "Everything had gone right with me since he [Pyle] had died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say I was sorry." Fowler needs to confess, but, an absolute atheist, he has denied God's existence. In the paradoxical theology of Graham Greene, guilt frequently turns one toward God.

When The Quiet American was published in 1955, many critics accused Greene of being anti-American. Twenty years later the American experiment in Vietnam an acknowledged disaster, he was proclaimed a prophet. Still later the release of a 2001 filmed version of the novel was postponed for a year in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center, a decision testifying to the story’s continuing capacity to evoke controversy.

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