By Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2015
This is one of the best novels I have read in a long time. After reading it twice, I am in awe of the writer.
The bulk of the novel is the written confession of a double agent. A committed though mostly undercover communist, he escapes Saigon with the General and Madame and others of their entourage just as the city is falling to the Viet Cong. The General was the head of the secret police, and the narrator (whom I will from here on refer to as N.) has participated in—at the very least observed—the torture of prisoners. His communist masters send him to the States on the understanding that he will transmit intelligence on the refugee community.
An American university degree and near perfect command of English qualify the General’s intelligence officer to pose as a cultural attache. The General masterminds a plan to invade Vietnam and take it away from the communists. N. goes on this hare-brained expedition, partly from a death wish and partly from the desire to save the life of his blood brother Bon.
Back in Vietnam, N. is caught up in the contradiction of many devout communists sent abroad. He has to be reeducated to cure him of the foreign ideas and attitudes he picked up while serving the cause of the party abroad, on a mission the party sent him on. His confession is central to this reeducation.
N. is the product of the rape of a Vietnamese teenage servant girl by a Roman Catholic priest. This rape is symbolic of the division and subjugation of the nation by its French and American masters. The boy is spurned by both the whites and by his mother’s Vietnamese relatives and is raised in poverty and isolation, feeling that he belongs nowhere except with his powerless poverty-stricken mother. She assures him, “You are God’s gift to me. Nothing or no one could be more natural.”
Childhood bullies taunt him that the union of his parents was like the mating of a cat and a dog. This prejudice may be expressed more kindly in his later life but it is always there. As an adult he finds solace in alcohol and promiscuous sex and by becoming flawlessly fluent in the language of Americans.
As a person between cultures N. sympathizes with everyone’s point of view but has no real self. Two halves do not in this case make a whole. His two blood brothers—Bon, who is one of the invading force, and Man, who judges his confession– represent the two sides of his divided, non-existent self. In classes taught by his father, N. is never addressed by name, only as “you,” and throughout the novel he remains the man without a name, the man who is only a pronoun.
Having read a lot on Philby, Burgess, and McLean, I am fascinated by spies and spying. One theory about these Cambridge spies is that as homosexuals at a time when homosexuality was still a crime they were accustomed to concealing their true selves and thus developed the secretiveness and false fronts necessary to spying. And although the Soviet system they spied for was no more tolerant of homosexuality than British society, these men may have acted from anger as much as from conviction. Another theory is that as they were all upper class, members of their own class never expected to be betrayed by one of their own and thus overlooked a great deal. As a man between cultures N. is truly accepted and trusted by no one and as a person of mixed blood is not taken seriously.
The weak part of the novel is the long digression involving the making of a movie in the Philippines about the Vietnam War. As I have been to the Philippines a number of times I found this part interesting as a standalone. Like the rest of the novel this section is highly entertaining, but it does little to advance the plot. It is a savagely satirical take on the making of Apocalypse Now, a movie I have never seen because I am uncomfortable with violence on the screen and prefer to create it for myself from the printed word to the extent possible for me. Nguyen obviously has fun satirizing Hollywood’s misrepresentation of Asians and other minorities and the weird assumptions that all Asians are interchangeable and that non-Asians may represent them better than they can represent themselves
My younger son worked in Vietnam and I have visited the country a couple of times. The novel makes the distinction between yellow or bourgeois music and red or communist music. In Vietnam I noticed the music in bars and restaurants seemed to be entirely instrumental. As in all totalitarian states, words are seen as dangerous there. Tourists are not bombarded with revolutionary lyrics but neither are they allowed to listen to love songs.
Even before going to Vietnam, I saw what Americans call the Vietnam War and what Vietnamese call the American War as formative for Canadians of my generation. Canadian society has been greatly enriched by draft resisters from that war and by the refugees who left in boats.
In the library I have looked for books from a non-American point of view, and that has usually turned out to be a few memoirs written by refugees who have become Americans and essentially adopted the American view of the conflict as a just war. Two opposing points of view do not, like the two halves of the narrator, make a whole. This writer manages to move the discussion of the conflict miles forward.
He moves the discussion forward by being angry at the Americans but also at the South Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. In an interview appended to the novel, he says, “Everybody in this book, especially our protagonist, is guilty of some kind of terrible behavior.” Of the Vietnamese on both sides, he says, “ …we aren’t just victims but victimizers as well.”
Humour and satire are difficult to sustain and few contemporary writers have the gift. Nguyen has a dazzling ability with language and with satire and the energy of his prose never flags. I cannot pick out a favourite passage or a favourite page because nearly every one is a favourite. I am looking forward to reading anything he writes.