Story was intriguing, but narration was awful
The Quiet American is a thought-provoking example of a story whose protagonist and villain both are distasteful characters. I liked how Graham Greene's story foreshadowed the huge mistakes made by the United States in Vietnam, and how these mistakes were motivated by an all-consuming hubris. To paraphrase the Thomas Fowler character, "I never knew a nation that had better motives for all the trouble it caused." (Although to be sure, the U.S. was not and is not the only nation to cause massive trouble in the world. Russia has certainly caused massive trouble as well - and without good motives!) I also like how Graham Greene was able to use both a distasteful protagonist (Thomas Fowler) and a distasteful antagonist (Alden Pyle) as the foundation of a story that was actually quite engaging. That's a trick that not all novelists can pull off. That being said, the Quiet American suffers from two weaknesses. First, there is the patronizing, infantilizing British view of all the nonwhite, non-Western peoples of the world. Second, there is Joseph Porter's narration, which was gratingly awful!