ABSTRACT

Early in 1951, Graham Greene first visited Hanoi. Greene describes the genesis of The Quiet American. While visiting a self-dramatizing officer of mixed race, Colonel Leroy, he shared a room with an American attached to the economic aid mission. He himself had served in Sierra Leone during the war. His marvellous novel The Heart of the Matter reflects a form of affection for the sheer hopeless weariness of colonial administrators trying to make something right out of what – sooner or later – must be wrong. The time-set of the main action in The Quiet American is the Chinese New Year, 1952, with a subsidiary sequence following Alden Pyle's death some time later. In The Quiet American, Greene describes the immense courtyard of the brothel but transfers his own experience to the loud-mouthed Granger, who is proud to be the centre of a scrimmage of competing pieces of tail.