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  • The Quiet American

  • By: Graham Greene
  • Narrated by: Simon Cadell
  • Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (862 ratings)
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The Quiet American

By: Graham Greene
Narrated by: Simon Cadell
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Summary

Into the intrigue and violence of Indo-China comes Pyle, a young idealistic American sent to promote democracy through a mysterious 'Third Force'. As his naive optimism starts to cause bloodshed, his friend Fowler finds it hard to stand and watch.
©1955 Graham Greene (P)2014 Audible, Inc.

What listeners say about The Quiet American

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

Love and War in Indo-China

I've seen filmed version of this book several times, but, after listening to this audio version, think the book is better. Not least because the main character, Fowler, a middle-aged foreign correspondent engages in much introspection that is difficult to depict in a film. Fowler is a typical Greene character: world weary, melancholy, with a young mistress and wife at a distance. The latter a devout Catholic which introduces ruminations about God and religion: common topics in Greene's more serious books.

Fowler is on a journalistic assignment reporting the Vietnam War. He has been living with a pragmatic young local woman for some time when he meets, Pyle, the American of the title whose official role is rather hazy but seems to have a have a hidden agenda to promote a Third Force in the area.

Fowler and Pyle surprisingly become friends and a section of the book describes a hair-raising trip they do together into the North of the country. Their friendship is strained by Pyle's desire to marry Fowler's mistress.

The story starts with the death of, Pyle, and switches back and forth in time to reveal by the end, how and why he died. On the way a number of well-rounded characters play their parts against the back-drop of the Vietnam War. There's intrigue, corruption, violence and love: a heady mixture that makes for an exciting, but sad story.

The reader of the book is excellent

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50 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Literally A Classic !!

Not sure if it's because I studied this for English Literature "O" level 40 years ago or that at the time it created a life long interest in the tragic story of Vietnam that has stayed with me since, but I have always loved this book.

Re-visiting it via Audible it has not lost any of it's brilliance for me and has to be one a Classic piece of literature from Graham Greene. An enthralling story mixed with many questions on morality and the human condition that is "life", 6 hours passed very quickly and all too soon it was finished.

The narration at first sounded a bit nasal but this disappeared quickly as the character developed and Simon Cadell really does justice to Greene's classic.

It was special to me when I was a teenager and more than 4 decades later, it's as good as it was when I studied it at school. Possibly my favourite book.

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19 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Great book and narration, poor production quality

Unfortunately, the audio for this recording has highly variable volume, making it alternately difficult to hear and too loud. However, the underlying narration is excellent and fits the tone of the novel perfectly.

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16 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Vietnam a fascinating backdrop

The performance definitely enhanced this book. The Vietnamese setting is like another character in the intriguing story, and the plot unfurls piece by well timed piece. The writing is more and more enjoyable, with especially interesting descriptions. This isn't normally the kind of book I thought I liked but I'm very glad I chose it.

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7 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

The emperor is dead, long live the emperor...

Thomas Fowler is a veteran journalist who’s been stationed for some years in Vietnam, reporting on the rising violence as France tries to cling on to its colony and America’s involvement is growing. The story begins when Fowler is told of the death of Alden Pyle, a young American attaché who had arrived in Saigon a few months earlier. Fowler then tells us the history of his relationship with Pyle – acquaintanceship, perhaps friendship, certainly rivalry. For Pyle had stolen Fowler’s young Vietnamese lover, Phuong, promising marriage and entry to the glamorous American world of skyscrapers and fashion that Phuong had read about in magazines. And along the way Greene shows us old colonialism giving way to the new American mission to use its wealth and military might to westernize and democratize the world, whether the world likes it or not.

When I read the blurb, I wondered why the book had been considered “controversial”, and now having read it, I assume it’s because of the anti-Americanism that runs through it. To be honest, for a Brit of my generation and political leanings, that isn’t exactly controversial – it’s quite a mainstream position, and one that exists just as much, or perhaps even more, today as back in the early 1950s when this book is set. Anti-Americanism is the wrong term, really; it’s more anti-US foreign policy – a belief that the US blunders into situations around the world that it doesn’t understand, values non-American life cheaply in pursuit of its aim to create an American hegemony, and then retreats, its own nose bloodied, leaving the people in a worse state than they were in before the Americans arrived. And sadly America’s allies, especially the UK, tend to allow the US to drag them into their military catastrophes. Greene wrote this book before the Vietnam war, but he clearly saw the writing on the wall and uses Pyle as a metaphor for the sometimes well-meaning but always fundamentally ruthless and self-interested policies the US has pursued since it decided to declare itself the “leader of the free world” after the Second World War.

However, old-style European colonialism fares no better. Greene shows it in its death throes, desperately trying to retain control of the colonies it still possesses, but gradually being forced into retreat, leaving the field open for the new superpowers to move in. The particular European empire in the book is the French, but Greene is clearly including all the old European empires in his critique. Fowler’s weary cynicism and fatalism about the future is as much a metaphor for tired and war-ravaged old Europe as Pyle is for brash young America. In their actions there’s not much to choose between them, but Europe, Greene seems to be suggesting, is finally learning the futility of trying to maintain its control over other peoples just at the point where the US has decided it will rule the world and impose its values and culture across the globe at the point of a gun. The question hangs unspoken in the Saigon air – how many lives are a price worth paying for the ideology of “freedom”? Pyle makes it clear that there’s no upper limit, so long, of course, as they’re not American lives.

Fortunately there’s an excellent human story to stop all this heavyweight political stuff from becoming too much. We learn of Pyle’s death in the first pages, and then go back to his arrival in Saigon as a seeming innocent. But he has more depth than first appears and Fowler is reluctantly drawn into a kind of intimacy with him because of Phuong, the young woman whom both men care about, though in different ways. Vietnam is in the midst of conflict with various factions fighting for power, sometimes with the overt or covert support of the various colonialist powers. Terrorist acts are a daily occurrence, and Greene shows the constant anxiety, the fear and the grief of living in a society in turmoil. And he shows the uncaring cruelty of those vying for power towards the people they use as pawns in their games.

Most of all I feel it’s a wonderful character study of Fowler – a man whose cynicism is founded on age and experience, whose career as a journalist reporting from the trouble spots of the world has allowed him to see humanity at its worst and has left him wary of those who believe they have the right or the power to impose their culture and control on others. Pyle and Phuong are shown to us only through Fowler’s eyes, but he is an honest observer, able to see the strengths and weaknesses in both of them and, indeed, in himself. And eventually we learn what led to Pyle’s death.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by Simon Cadell. While his narration is good overall, it has some weaknesses, not least that he sometimes seems to forget that Pyle is American. It’s also an older recording and the sound quality is not great – the volume dips and rises, and sometimes it’s a bit fuzzy. This is one case where I would recommend reading rather than listening, unless you can find a better narration. The book itself, though, is wonderful – undoubtedly one of Greene’s best and therefore highly recommended!

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6 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Masterpiece

Clearly a masterpiece! I think if one is used to the really very modern audiobooks where the sound is crystal clear then you may well struggle with here. The narrator is fine, rather like Richard Burton however the sound dips up and down and there is a slight hiss throughout.
The book itself went over my head but I enjoyed it. I’m more of a nuts and bolts type of fellow and this had more of the A farewell to arms about it. That said it’s poignancy wasn’t hard or it subtext too gratuitous. Dark stuff! It raises a lot of questions especially if you’re interested in the resulting Vietnam War. Anyway rock on kids and carry on reading.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

a book for everybody !

loved this book the narrator was amazing i couldnt leave it sad it was finished

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

poor editing and irritating reading

It's a great story, but the reading voice is so monotonous and expressionless that it sounds fake and irritating rather than disillusioned . The editing is terrible, with jumps, gaps and pauses.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars

One of my favourite books

An excellent story with superb narration by Simon Cadell - recommended.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Never Mind 'Brilliant' - Should Be Mandatory!

Former US Chief of General Staff and US Secretary of State Colin Powell maintained that Bernard Fall's 'Street Without Joy' should be mandatory reading for all senior US Officers before going to Vietnam. Obviously it wasn't and mores the pity but they could have saved themselves a lot of time (and misery) had they simply chosen this wonderful classic by a Master Storyteller - and it is less than half the length! To me in 2019 whilst the story and character of Fowler is redolent of a bygone age far removed from today's so-called journalists ("I am a Reporter...my job is simply to report what happens, not comment on it!) the American, Pyle, sums up all that is wrong with American foreign policy both in Vietnam and since - ideas gleaned from a textbook and applied to a situation they have little comprehension of but nevertheless done for all the 'right' motives thereby exacerbating a situation they never clearly understood in the first place. And don't get me wrong - I' love the Americans but just wish they would sometimes think things out a bit more before assuming that everyone wants the same things they do. I loved this book and cannot fault it in any way. Please do yourself a favor and listen to a beautifully read story that is so much more than the sum of its parts.

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2 people found this helpful