![]() Arnold has suggested in a perceptive review in the Twentieth Century, for all its bitter anti-Americanism, The Quiet American depends for its chief effects on what Greene has absorbed from contemporary American writing. ![]() In Greene’s anglicized version it remains essentially unaltered, however much invested with more worldly finish and sophistication. The formula is of course an American product. Add to this the sharp up-to-date tone of very knowing, brusque, tough irony and provocative (tender-hard) disillusionment, plus a liberal dose of unsparing sexual detail, and you get the seemingly irresistible formula that is being applied nowadays more and more widely in fiction. The novel is in the main a crime story, or whodunit-a well-constructed one with tension maintained throughout and a surprise ending that many a reader will kick himself for not having foreseen. It is outselling all his other books in England but won’t go over so well in this country-for obvious reasons. ![]() ![]() In The Quiet American Graham Greene has drawn upon his first-hand experience of the war in Indo-China to produce a thriller with political complications. ![]()
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