"God save us from the innocent and the good"

Religion doesn't play a significant role in "The Quiet American," Greene's most scalding attack on American moral hubris. The narrator, Thomas Fowler, is an atheist who, unlike the spurned lover in "The End of the Affair," never gets nudged in the direction of faith. This is a canny choice on Greene's part, for whatever his personal beliefs, with pen in hand he was always a novelist first. Fowler's jadedness is a necessary counterpart to Pyle's idealism, and everything in a Greene novel serves the purpose of the whole. There's nothing strained or self-consciously "literary" about the book, which is one of its marvels. In Greene's fiction, craft is perfected to a level so high it's indistinguishable from art; "The Quiet American" is like a splendid racehorse, in which the beauty of the creature itself can't be divided from its efficiency in the production of speed.

Alden Pyle, Fowler's nemesis and would-be friend, ostensibly works for the American Economic Mission, an aid operation. He is actually (as Greene himself was) a spy, and also more than that. A CIA operative, he supplies arms to General Thé, a glorified bandit, having convinced himself that the general represents a nationalist "third force," or alternative to both the colonial French and the Communist Viet Minh. General Thé uses the explosives Pyle gives him to bomb a Saigon square, an attack that Pyle knows about in advance and that kills several innocent civilians.

Robert Stone, in his contentious introduction to the new Penguin edition, argues that Pyle is not an accurate representation of any American Greene might have met in Vietnam. Sherry, Greene's biographer, tends to agree, and points out that the elaborate code of honor Pyle adheres to in trying to win Fowler's mistress, Phuong, clearly belongs to the elite English boarding-school world in which Greene was educated. Pyle doesn't even talk like an American: "This isn't a bit suitable for her," he says at one point, with a very British fussiness.

But if Pyle isn't quite convincing as a flesh-and-blood American CIA agent running explosives in 1950s Vietnam, he does embody an aspect of the American national character that Greene rightly feared. With his "wide campus gaze" and an armful of books -- "The Challenge to Democracy," "The Role of the West" -- by the wonderfully named "expert" York Harding, Pyle could be a neocon acolyte, clutching his copy of Kenneth Pollack's "The Threatening Storm," and girded with prefabricated theories about how to solve "the Mideast problem."

"Greeneland," that collection of hinterland outposts where compromised men and women muddle through their seedy destinies, lies so close to the fictional province of Noir that the two territories share similar emotional climates and appeal to much the same people. There are scenes in "The Quiet American" that attain a kind of ecstasy of world-weariness: Confronted by Pyle about lies he's told in order to keep Phuong, Fowler says, "This is European duplicity, Pyle. We have to make up for our lack of supplies."

"The Quiet American," however, manages to exploit the pleasures of genre cynicism without cutting it any slack. Like "Casablanca," it's the story of a man with a policy of detachment who, when subjected to enough moral tension, is finally provoked to act. But Fowler's act, a homicidal betrayal whose motives are muddy to say the least, has none of the romantic unselfishness of Rick putting Ilsa on the plane with Victor Laszlo. It's a grubby intervention, one that might have been written to placate Orwell. As Zadie Smith puts it in the introduction to the British edition of the paperback (the Stone introduction appears only in the American edition), there is "no real way to be good in Greene, there are simply a million ways to be more or less bad."

But to be bad and to know it is Fowler's saving grace, because it means he's paying attention. "God save us always," he says, "from the innocent and the good." To be innocent and good is to remain impervious to the world, the way Pyle can't quite register the blood on his shoes after he walks through the freshly bombed square in Saigon. Greene, a great noticer of the specifics of a place, sees an implacable threat in those who refuse to see what lies around them. People still, after 50 years, read "The Quiet American" while visiting Vietnam, and still find it powerful. If Pyle isn't entirely plausible as a character, the country itself stands vividly on the pages.

As Smith puts it, Greene uses "details" to "fight the good fight against big, featureless, impersonal ideas like Pyle's." The novel itself is one long refutation of the neat, abstract theories that Pyle clings to in defiance of the concrete, chaotic realities of Vietnam. He is the reminder Greene left for us that we cannot, not even with the best of intentions, blindly and deafly impose our will on the world without doing unforgivable violence. And then, with blood on our shoes, we will fail.

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