... was written in 1955. It depicts the uprooting of French colonialism in Vietnam by the Americans during the 1950s, implicitly questioning the foundations of growing American involvement there. It explores this subject through the links between its three main characters, and has received much attention due to its prediction of the outcome of the Vietnam War and subsequent American foreign policy.
The title character is Alden Pyle – a CIA agent, working undercover. He is thoughtful, softly–spoken, intellectual, serious, and idealistic; but he is so blinded by American exceptionalism that he cannot see the calamities he brings upon the Vietnamese.
('American exceptionalism', to paraphrase Wikipedia, is the belief that firstly, the United States, as the first 'new nation', has a history that is inherently different from those of other nations; secondly, that the USA has a unique mission to transform the world – to ensure that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth; and thirdly, that this history and this mission give the USA a superiority over other nations.)
The other two principal characters are Thomas Fowler, a jaded, cynical, fifty–something British journalist, and Phuong, a beautiful young Vietnamese woman, who is Fowler's lover at the beginning of the novel, but leaves him for Pyle when he shows that Fowler has lied to her.
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