Fed by fear of the draft which deterred young Brits from going to America, and a spate of excellent but harrowing films, my memories of the Vietnam War are limited to the doomed efforts of the American government to drive the Communists out of the north in the 1960s. In fact, this war lasted from 1955-75, and was preceded by the shorter first Indo-China about which my knowledge is very shaky. This is the period in which Graham Greene sets his classic, “The Quiet American”, to which I turned with a huge sense of relief after struggling through a few superficial, over-hyped modern novels.

The narrator is Fowler, a cynical British journalist, although we never quite learn what disappointments have driven him so far from his native land. He finds solace in opium and his beautiful young mistress Phuong – a relationship which may seem exploitative to readers seventy years on. He reports objectively on the attempts by the French to prevent the insurgency of the Communist Việt Minh into their Far Eastern colony, showing great foresight in observing that the increasing American involvement will come to nothing, and “in five hundred years there may be no New York or London, but they’ll be growing paddy in these fields, they’ll be carrying their produce to market on long poles wearing their pointed hats”.

Fowler is therefore irritated by what he sees as the naivety of Pyle, an idealistic young American, newly arrived in Vietnam to work for the Economic Aid Mission. It becomes apparent that he may even be a menace, through his desire to meddle in the situation via direct action, by promoting a “Third Force”, as advocated by a writer he much admires.

As Fowler tries to warn him, “We are the old colonial peoples, Pyle, but we’ve learned a bit of reality, we’ve learned not to play with matches. This Third Force – it comes out of a book, that’s all. General Thé’s only a bandit with a few thousand men, he’s not a national democracy”.

Fowler’s growing animosity is fuelled by Pyle’s infatuation with Phuong, whom he wishes to marry and save from what seems to him a sad fate if she stays with Fowler – too old and separated from a wife who refuses to divorce him.

It is not a spoiler to reveal Pyle’s murder, which is reported at the outset. The intrigue lies in the revelation of how this comes about, and the question of the extent of Fowler’s involvement in it, and of the degree to which an action can be justified if the motives are suspect. This psychological drama plays out against vivid images of life in Vietnam of the 1950s, from the cities to the tense encounters with the enemy in the countryside. As a reader, one can simply be absorbed in Fowler’s personal crisis, without always being entirely clear about the various power groups involved. On the other hand, the novel is an opportunity to understand a past conflict more clearly, and consider parallels with the present.

In around 180 pages of tight prose peppered with wry observation and convincing dialogue (except perhaps when Fowler is telling Pyle about love while the two men take refuge in a watch tower), Greene transports us into a different world. To absorb all this, the book needs to be read slowly, more than once. It is a masterpiece, perhaps in danger of being forgotten beneath piles of more recent mediocre undemanding fiction.