Only a writer as talented as Greene could bring so much to a slim volume of only 157 pages - and this is, according to his Preface, merely a novelisation of his original screen-script.
The setting: Vienna, at the end of the Second World War
The narrator: Calloway: a Scotland Yard detective
Main Players: Rollo Martin: writer of pulp Westerns, old friend of…..
Harry Lime: old friend of Rollo Martin, killed in an accident before Martin arrives in Vienna to visit him
Anna Schmidt: poor actress; Harry Lime’s ‘girl’.

In a few sentences, Greene shows us the sad remains of Vienna: ’the smashed dreary city…divided up in zones among the four powers; the Russians, the British, the American, the French zones, regions marked only by notice boards’. Vienna is now ‘simply a city of undignified ruins which turned that February into great glaciers of snow and ice’. A Vienna once famous for its coffee houses, now serving ersatz coffee.

Rollo Martin is naive; he hero worshiped Lime ‘for twenty years, since the first meeting in a grim school corridor with a cracked bell ringing for prayers’ and cannot believe Calloway’s story of Lime being ’the worst racketeer who ever made a dirty living in this city’. He also doesn’t believe that Lime’s death was an accident, and sets out to clear his name, and find his murderer.

So Calloway lets Martin investigate Lime’s death, knowing that an amateur can often illicit more information that a police officer. Half way through the novel, we are finally introduced to ’the third man’, and Greene’s clever twist in his tale.

As an aside, Greene is famous for being a convert to Catholoicism and although this book is not considered one of his ‘Catholic’ novels, the religion gets quite a few mentions, including a reference to the obscure Jansenist movement, a theological movement active in France during the 17th and 18th century.

Now it’s time to find a copy of the film staring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten, which, according to the Preface, has a different ending to the book.

I didn’t know what to expect with this book. I’ve enjoyed several of Greene’s books, but Travels is nothing like anything else he has written!

What a romp! I listened to the book narrated by Tim Pigott-Smith who was just amazing. Perhaps I wouldn’t have enjoyed this as much if I’d just read it. Pigott-Smith brought all the characters to life.

Henry Pulling is enjoying his early retirement from banking, tending his dahlias. He has never married, and has accepted a quiet life in a quintessential English village. That is until he meets his Aunt Augusta at his mother’s funeral. Augusta is like a whirlwind in Henry’s life and before he knows it he finds himself her travel companion. Gradually Henry realises that what he thought was ’life’ was not ’living’ at all, but merely existing. We all need an Aunt Augusta in our lives to shake us out of our complacency!

My only disappointment with the book occurs at the very last, where Henry marries a very young girl - he’s more than old enough to be her father and it spoiled the end of the book for me. But I’m choosing to overlook this momentary slip by Greene, as I found the rest of the book a lot of fun.

“Innocence is a kind of insanity.”
I have read a lot of books written recently that are lauded as ‘classics’. Maybe they will be, in time, but this is a classic. Originally published in 1955, it is still fresh and relevant, and at 180 pages it is a masterclass in conveying so much, with an economy of words. And it is how Greene uses these words - nothing is wasted; nothing is for mere trimming or padding; every word is chosen with care.

The story is set in Vietnam, during the French Colonial war. We meet our three main characters: Fowler, our narrator, is an older man; cynical, a British foreign correspondent; Pyle is a young idealistic American diplomat and Phuong, a Vietnamese women who both men love (in their own way) and want to possess.

I fell in love with Greene’s descriptions of his characters. Phuong: “She was the hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain hour of the night and the promise of rest.” Pyle: “He looked more than every out of place: he should have stayed at home. I saw him in a family snapshot album, riding on a dude ranch, bathing on Long Island, photographed with his colleagues in some apartment on the twenty-third floor. He belonged to the skyscraper and the express elevator, the ice-cream and the dry Martinis, milk at lunch, and chicken sandwiches on the Merchant Limited.” Fowler’s behaviour is understandable in light of his beliefs: “Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying.” Rather than describing how they look, Greene shows us who they really are.

Greene weaves these three lives through the narrative to illustrate the damage so often done with the best of intentions. As Fowler says of Pyle: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.” Greene makes his feelings about the senseless loss of innocent lives during war clear: “A two hundred pound bomb does not discriminate. How many dead colonels justify a child’s or a trishaw driver’s death when you are building a national democratic front?” This is a story that illustrates that ‘the political is personal’.

Greene raises many moral questions: about war; about love and passion (and possession); about religion and how “sooner or later…[one has] to take sides. If one is to remain human.” The friendship between these two men who would not normally ever cross paths is tinged with a sense of doom. If I were to use one word to describe the emotion that The Quiet American stirred in me, it would be melancholy.