Maybe it was already over for us in Indochina when Alden Pyle’s body washed up under the bridge at Dakao, his lungs all full of mud; maybe it caved in with Dien Ben Phu. But the first happened in a novel, and while the second happened on the ground it happened to the French, and Washington gave it no more substance than if Graham Greene had made it up, too.

——Michael Herr, Dispatches

I first encountered The Quiet American between the pages of two other excellent books, Michael Herr’s Dispatches and John le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy. In both, Greene’s novel is a constant subtle presence in the minds of the other characters — real in Herr’s book, fictional in le Carré’s — coloring their actions and their views of the world; almost a character in its own right.

Dispatches and Schoolboy are both old favorites, books I go back to year after year. If I ever write anything half as good (okay, three-fourths; a man’s reach should exceed his grasp) I’ll have no regrets about my writing career. For some reason, though, I didn’t get around to reading Quiet American until three or four years ago, and I only read it once. I’m not sure why.

Partly, I suppose, it’s that at the time, for various personal reasons, I couldn’t sympathize with Thomas Fowler; I felt the same way about Fowler’s relationship with Phuong that Alden Pyle did. But then — particularly after reading Dispatches and Schoolboy — I wasn't about to sympathize with Pyle, either.

Now, though, I seem to have reached what Michael Ondaatje called the age where I identify with cynical villains in books, and I’m going to have to give Quiet American another try. Much of the credit for that will have to go to Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, not to mention Philip Noyce.

A lot of reviewers have bitched about Fraser in the Alden Pyle role, and I’m not really sure why; maybe they just have trouble taking him seriously. For my part I thought he was an excellent choice: fresh-faced, naive, and optimistic, so it’s all the more shocking when you realize just what he’s gotten himself — and Indochina — into.

Dispatches and Schoolboy left me disgusted with the mendacity and deliberate ignorance that kept the US in Vietnam. What Fraser’s performance in Quiet American did for me was get past all that, to remind me of the honest good intentions that got us in there in the first place, and make me appreciate the tragedy latent in those good intentions, and in the moral compromises that they inevitably led to. You can sympathize with Fraser’s Pyle even as you’re convinced that he’s dead, dead wrong.

As for Michael Caine, I’ve always liked him, even when he was playing unlikeable characters, and his Thomas Fowler is far from unlikeable. One of the aspects of the novel that I expected to most irritate me in the film is the way the character of Phuong is made to be — rather explicitly — a stand-in for the whole country of Vietnam; I’m almost sure that’s what she was to Greene, a symbol, a way of concretizing the conflict between Fowler and Pyle, making the political and intellectual into something personal, sensual.

What Caine does with his performance is make Fowler’s love for Phuong human and individual — he’s in love with her, not just with Vietnam. Which in turn makes her more individual as well. And then when Fowler does finally take a stand on what’s happening to Vietnam, the country isn’t just a stand-in for Phuong, either. But you can see that he sees that his personal entanglement with her (and with Pyle) makes his motives suspect, clouds the morality of his actions. Pyle does the wrong thing for the right reasons; Fowler can’t even be sure of his reasons.

Noyce’s film may not be a neatly wrapped rhetorical package. But Umberto Eco, I think it was, described the novel as “a machine for generating interpretations,” and the best film adaptations, I think, are the ones that expand the scope of possible interpretations their originals generate. On that score, I think the film does a pretty good job.

Now I’ll have to go back to the novel and see if I’m right. If I am, The Quiet American may yet find a permanent place on my bookshelf.

‘Pity you ran out of steam,’ Ming bawled, to Jerry and anyone else who cared to listen. ‘Nobody’s brought off the eastern novel recently, my view. Greene managed it, if you can take Greene, which I can’'t, too much popery.’

——John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy