Monthly Archives: October 2016

The Late Victorian Underworld: Gods of Gold

31 Monday Oct 2016

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Review: Gods of Gold, by Chris Nickson
Severn, 2014. 212 pp. $29

The gasworkers’ union of Leeds, England, has walked off the job, and management has called in scabs (“blacklegs,” in British parlance) to break the strike. The union men will defend their turf with their fists, if necessary, whereas the owners have no qualms calling in the army and having the police read the Riot Act, which would allow the troops to fire on anyone refusing to disperse. That prospect appalls Detective Inspector Tom Harper, who grew up in a poor Leeds backstreet, and whose loyalties lie with the strikers. But such are the social tensions of 1890. And in a city where gas lights industries and the more affluent homes and shops, the police are there to support the rights of property, with justice often coming a distant second.

Harold Gilman's painting of Leeds Market, 1913 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Harold Gilman’s painting of Leeds Market, 1913 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

If Tom needed any further lessons in that hard truth, he has them in the case of Martha Parkinson, a nine-year-old girl who’s gone missing, and whose drunken, deadbeat father has been murdered. Desperate to find the girl alive, Tom enlists the aid of the Parkinsons’ neighbors, who’d normally look on the constabulary as enemies. But because it’s a missing child, who could have belonged to any family–and because Tom used to walk the beat in that neighborhood, where he built a reputation for honesty and fairness–the locals agree to help. But information comes in minuscule grains, and people fear even to reveal that little, which tells Tom that someone powerful is behind the crimes against the Parkinsons. Sure enough, that power causes ever-increasing mayhem, as more murders follow. But though Tom’s immediate superior sympathizes with the detective’s dedication (though not his politics), orders are orders, and Tom has to devote himself to protecting the strikebreakers when he fears that young Martha may die, if he doesn’t find her soon.

Among the many pleasures Gods of Gold offers is this strong sense of time and place. This is a short novel, and Nickson spends few words on description. Yet he shows the grit underfoot, how the poor age prematurely because of hard work or drink, the darkness that envelops their homes, or the filthy air of Leeds:

From November to March soot lingered around town in clinging, harsh palls of dark fog. It made men cough and spit black phlegm, the stink of industry the price of the town’s success. The snow was grey before it even touched the ground.

In such a place, life has sharp edges and crime its attractions, as with the man “who’d never held a real job but made his living like a magpie, stealing the shiny things he saw.” Images like that stay with me.

Nickson takes care to sketch in the background characters. Tom’s sidekick, Billy Reed, is an ex-soldier who drinks too hard–trying to forget the war in Afghanistan–and who loses his self-control, beating a witness who refuses to talk. This is the stinking guts of police work, and Nickson papers over nothing. The difficulty of apprehending a criminal, and the lack of resources that limits the police, come through loud and clear in small details, as when Tom is forever having to walk places to conduct his investigations, should the horse-drawn tram not be running, or he’s feeling too light in the purse to pay for a hackney.

On a lighter side, Tom’s engaged to marry a widow, Annabelle, who owns a tavern and a couple bakeries. She’s a businesswoman with a mind of her own, and she constantly surprises him with new ideas. When first introduced, she’s installing light bulbs in her tavern and tells Tom that electricity is the future–which is not only correct, it’s an understated comment on the strike, a suggestion that what Leeds is fighting over will soon pass, no matter which side wins. More importantly, she’s got more money than Tom does and greater financial security, a gender-role reversal that feels different from what he was taught to believe. But wise, loving soul that he is, he sees nothing wrong in it. Feminism in late Victorian England; how refreshing.

Gods of Gold promises to be the first of a series, and that’s good news. But if I had my druthers, I’d want Nickson to pay attention to a couple literary tics. His narrative sometimes repeats itself, as with “how-could-he” questions (“how could Tom prove such-and-such, if. . . .”), which I take as authorial worries that the reader won’t connect the dots. Rest easy, Mr. Nickson; your narrative speaks for itself. And though he excels at the “no–and furthermore” aspect of storytelling, fashioning the case one bit at a time, as with a mosaic, a few setbacks get resolved a mite too easily, as with the consequences of Billy Reed smacking a witness around too hard.

But I look forward to further installments of Detective Inspector Harper’s exploits.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Happy Birthday: This Blog Is Two Years Old

27 Thursday Oct 2016

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Once more, thank you for visiting. Whether you’re a regular reader or just dropping by, I’m glad you’ve come and hope you take away something that stays with you. You’re the reason I do this; without you, there’d be no point.

As I did last year, I’ll briefly recap my favorite books from the last twelve months. They belong to different genres within historical fiction, but from each I’ve taken away something that stays with me.

In no particular order, I particularly recommend these:

Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, by Chris Cleave, tells a marvelously observed, wrenching tale of a love triangle during World War II. Think you’ve been there, done that? You haven’t, until you’ve read this one.

Sacred Hunger, by Barry Unsworth, explores Britain’s eighteenth-century slave trade to depict the human urge that puts profit before morality, decency, or empathy. So many novels have overdrawn, flat antagonists, but this book has two utterly real, compelling villains, one of many facets to this brilliant work of literature.

Stewart O’Nan’s thriller, City of Secrets, set in Jerusalem in 1945, portrays in elegant, tense economy the struggle to liberate Palestine, both against the British and among the Jewish organizations fighting them, with a political romance at the center.

Rush Oh!, Shirley Barrett’s delicate, lovely story about whaling in Australia around the turn of the twentieth century, surprises with its humor, compassion, and home truths about selflessness and its opposite.

Long Man, Amy Greene’s elegy for a dying town in 1936, tells how the Tennessee Valley Authority’s dam building raises issues of blood, land, and power. Greene’s rugged, potent prose and deceptively simple premise deliver a haunting novel.

You don’t have to like stories of wooden ships and iron men to appreciate Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander, the first installment of the famous series about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Yes, O’Brian knows so much about the sea, it’s effortless, like breathing, but he shows the same touch with the English language and his main characters’ inner lives.

Andrea Molesini’s Not All Bastards Are From Vienna deals squarely with the First World War’s injustice, cruelty, and stupidity, yet is thoroughly engaging, thanks to the characters’ ingenuity, forcefulness, and mordant wit. They’re larger than life yet wholly plausible, the secret of great fiction.

Mary Renault’s classic, The Bull From the Sea, tells the story of Theseus, in such a way that the well-known myth becomes a deep, thought-provoking manifesto on the use of power and the virtue of forbearance. I wish our politicians were half as sensible.

Winston Graham’s Ross Poldark, the first of many volumes in another famous series, tells about an eighteenth-century iconoclast in Cornwall who tries to reform his life and lands–and then meets a young girl who’s an absolute firecracker.

In The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes re-creates the life of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Russian composer who just manages to escape’s Stalin’s purges and often wonders whether he made the right choice. A riveting, darkly funny story.

Paul Goldberg, in The Yid, also revisits the Stalin years, supposing that the Great Leader was planning a second Holocaust in the 1950s, and that his antagonist is a former actor from the state Yiddish Theater. Fiction doesn’t get any bolder–or more absurdly real–than this.

Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for The Sympathizer, and he deserved it. A riveting-to-the-eyeballs tale about the Vietnam War, told in flawless prose from the vantage point of a Communist mole within the South Vietnamese intelligence service, this novel skewers both sides and everyone connected with them. Superb.

Anything you particularly liked during the last year?

 

Adventure on Ironbottom Sound: The Commodore

24 Monday Oct 2016

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Review: The Commodore, by P. T. Deutermann
St. Martin’s, 2016. 296 pp. $27

Ever wonder what it was like to command a U.S. Navy vessel in the South Pacific during World War II? Read this novel, and you’ll know.

It’s 1942, and Japanese land and naval forces are pressing the Marines dug in on Guadalcanal. The learning curve for the U.S. Navy, charged with maintaining and protecting that fragilely held Solomon Islands outpost, has been steep and costly. So many ships have been sunk that one sea lane has been nicknamed Ironbottom Sound. But Vice Admiral William “Bull” Halsey has been charged with winning the naval battle, and to do so, he’s assembled a task force and hand-picked his captains.

Cruiser U.S.S. Portland in dry dock for repairs in Australia after a naval battle off Guadalcanal, 1942 (Courtesy Australian War Memorial via Wikimedia Commons)

Heavy cruiser U.S.S. Portland in for repairs in Australia after a naval battle off Guadalcanal, 1942 (Courtesy Australian War Memorial via Wikimedia Commons)

Among them is Harmon Wolf, a Native American who, before the war, overcame bigotry to graduate Annapolis with a solid record, though his temper, as well as prejudice, have held back his career. For instance, Wolf once entertained notions of entering the Navy’s aviation program, but when a superior officer tossed a racial epithet his way, he tossed the officer through a window. That was deemed bad for business, but Bull Halsey likes aggressive punchers who’ll take the battle to the enemy, and Wolf promises to be that. Soon, he’s promoted to commodore, responsible for a squadron of destroyers.

The lone wolf is a well-worn cliché in military fiction, and by naming his protagonist as he does, Deutermann’s hardly subtle. Likewise, his prose is workmanlike at best (and sometimes repeats itself). Nevertheless, he does a good job portraying the naval mindset that Halsey and his protegés must struggle against. Wolf chafes against the military dictum that junior officers don’t challenge orders, because he senses that doing things by the book will only cause disaster. He quickly realizes that the Imperial Japanese Navy is much better than the office pen-pushers suppose–specifically, that the Japanese excel at night maneuvers; deploy more accurate, reliable torpedoes; have faster ships; and, most importantly, never fall for the same ruse twice. It’s as if the American brass have succumbed to their own propaganda about an inferior, incompetent enemy, a viewpoint that Wolf risks his reputation to correct.

Halsey is different, of course, and lucky for Wolf that he is, for Harmon’s plans don’t always work; as always in war, plans change almost immediately on contact with the enemy. Moreover, the Japanese score their victories too, which adds to the tension and makes The Commodore truer to life. The battle scenes in particular come across with intense vividness; Deutermann conveys what it’s like to be on the bridge or in a control room when high explosives fill the air, and he clearly knows his way around a warship:

J. B. King palpably jumped when the snipes opened the throttles and hit the turbines with a bolus of steam for fifty thousand horsepower. The forced-draft blowers screamed as they spooled up to feed fuel oil going into the fireboxes. King was the lead ship, so if the other two didn’t get the message, there was no danger of King driving over the top of a destroyer still loafing along at fifteen knots.

If you read The Commodore simply for the thrill of action or for a taste of the South Pacific Fleet, you’ll do fine, because you haven’t expected too much. The narrative could have assumed a whole extra dimension had Wolf connected the prejudice against himself with that against the Japanese–or, for that matter, the African-American stewards aboard ship–but Deutermann doesn’t care to go there. The Navy lingo can fly too thickly at times, with COMSOPAC and Div212 and the DRT in the CIC, and I’m still not sure what a Mike boat is. But those details don’t matter, and I’m not the kind of reader who throws a fit just because there’s a word I don’t understand. The action’s pretty clear, and that’s enough.

Also, Wolf’s outspoken way and maverick thought processes make him an agreeable companion, and Deutermann drops in the “no–and furthermore” device enough to keep you guessing. But he also undercuts the tension by having Halsey intervene, just when you think that Wolf has overreached once too often. And it’s no surprise when a pretty, willing nurse shows up, a war widow who seems to spend little time or energy mourning her late husband, another timeworn cliché.

For what it is, though, The Commodore makes the grade.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

An Irresistible Tale: The Hummingbird’s Daughter

17 Monday Oct 2016

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Review: The Hummingbird’s Daughter, by Luis Alberto Urrea
Little, Brown, 2006. 495 pp. $15

This beguiling novel defies first appearances, and a lucky thing for me, or I wouldn’t have read it.

Set in late nineteenth-century Mexico, The Hummingbird’s Daughter tells the early life of Teresa, the so-called Saint of Cabora. Born the illegitimate, half-Indian child of a well-to-do rancher, Teresa shows remarkable aptitude from a young age. She learns to ride a horse better than most men, to read, to dispute, and to remain serene in the face of insult, all of which appalls and enthralls her natural father, Don Tomás, who–extraordinarily–welcomes her into his house. She also studies with Huila, a salty, old herbal and spiritual healer, eventually surpassing and supplanting her; that too appalls and amazes Don Tomás, who worries what will happen. The young girl travels to far-off lands in her dreams, converses with God, delivers babies, and develops a large following, which, as Don Tomás has predicted, can come to no good.

José de la Cruz Porfirio Diaz Mori, who ruled Mexico for thirty-five years,, photographed in 1910; this novel portrays him, from afar, as a corrupt, malignant figure (Courtesy Aurelio Escobar Castellanos Archive, via Wikimedia Commons)

José de la Cruz Porfirio Diaz Mori, as he appeared in 1910, ruled Mexico for thirty-five years; this novel portrays him, from afar, as a corrupt, malignant figure (Courtesy Aurelio Escobar Castellanos Archive, via Wikimedia Commons)

As a rule, I avoid magical realism. As far as I’m concerned, One Hundred Years of Solitude is aptly titled, because those are the conditions I’d need before I could finish it. My teeth hurt if I have to read how the mystically gifted sweep away evil merely by waving a hand, and how a popular uprising forestalls the vengeance that would ordinarily result. Nor do I care much for macho fantasies in which beautiful women fall into an unscrupulous seducer’s arms without having to be asked twice, and that their love either reforms him, makes the earth move, or both. And much as I detest various aspects of modern life, I groan whenever I come across a narrative based on “the wisdom of the ancients,” as if peccadilloes of the past like witch-burnings, serfdom, or endemic smallpox never happened, or that our contemporary malaise wouldn’t last ten minutes if we could only summon up pseudo-profundities said to be lost to time.

Nevertheless, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, which skates parallel to that last category, is a terrific book. Urrea wins over this jaundiced reviewer for several reasons, chief among them his refusal to let his theme obscure reality. Teresa, or Teresita, as she’s usually known, may be called a saint, a title she dislikes and has never sought, but that only increases her burden to prove herself. Thousands of people flock to receive her healing powers, imputing to her motives, methods, and sympathies that she doesn’t possess. The established church calls her a heretic; the politicians, a traitor who preaches revolution. Men despise her for being a woman beyond their control, even as they dream of raping her. Those who fashion themselves of European extraction hate her as an Indian. Consequently, not only does Teresita fail to bring evil to a standstill–never her intention, anyway–everyone sees in her what they wish, using her for their own purposes. Naturally, the poor young woman tires of it all.

Only vigorous, unbridled prose can carry a narrative like this. Urrea’s grasp of biblical phrasing, Spanish cadences, and florid, earthy expression make this novel a delight to read:

Crows, attracted by the stink and the tumult, spied on them from the treetops, hopping along from tree to tree, peeking out from between the ragged leaves. And buzzards, attracted by the flapping crows, hypnotized by all the wandering meat beneath them, circled and dreamed of putrescence and death, the deliciousness of rot. And unknown and unseen, to the north of the trail only five miles away from the rancho, three dead men grinned under the soil, shot by Rurales for their scant gold and their boots, buried hastily and half-eaten by beetles and voles, tunneling wildcats and foxes, these three leathery travelers vibrated underground as the people passed, shook in their paltry graves as if they were laughing, giggling, their yellow mouths wide in toothy hilarity.

But besides casual violence, lust, and the hardness of life, there’s humor too. I laughed at the burro who dreamed of kicking the children entertaining themselves at its expense, at Don Tomás’s seemingly endless supply of friendly insults, and the various harmless obsessions that grip the characters. The laughter helps see to it that events and actions in The Hummingbird’s Daughter are seldom just one thing but many, depending on how they’re viewed, and Urrea has the sense not to push too hard. For instance, Teresita learns to remember always that she comes from the earth and belongs to it (the essential difference between herself and the corrupt, Westernized church and government). Yet she also comes to appreciate modern conveniences that Don Tomás’s engineer friend, Lauro Aguirre, has installed in the main house. So the reverence for old ways gets tempered, somewhat, or at least makes room for certain pleasures.

And speaking of pleasures, that’s what The Hummingbird’s Daughter is, a rollicking tale in which the many pages slide swiftly by.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

How Not to Write a Mystery: Death at the Paris Exposition

13 Thursday Oct 2016

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Review: Death at the Paris Exposition, by Frances McNamara
Allium, 2016. 253 pp.

The Paris Exposition of 1900 was a landmark, a great show of scientific, artistic, technological, and cultural marvels. It marked the turn of what many people believed would be a century of unheard-of progress, peace, and inventiveness. Its great engineering feat, the Eiffel Tower, has become an internationally known symbol, and the exhibit halls built for the fair remain among the city’s finest.

Lucien Baylac's image of the 1900 Paris Exposition, digitized in 2007 (Courtesy Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons)

Lucien Baylac’s image of the 1900 Paris Exposition, digitized in 2007 (Courtesy Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons)

So any novel titled Death at the Paris Exposition has much thematic material to draw on, a milieu tailor-made for fiction, and enough potential characters to fill every café on the Champs-Elysée. Unfortunately, McNamara makes little use of the resources available, and the result, at times, reads like a primer on how not to write a mystery–or any novel, for that matter.

The premise works well enough. Bertha Palmer, a Chicago socialite, has been named to the American commission to the exposition, the only woman to hold that post. Mrs. Palmer names Emily Chapman, a university lecturer, as her social secretary, so that Emily, her physician husband, Stephen, and their three children occupy part of the splendid house the Palmers have rented. More to the point, you can’t attend the formal luncheons, dinners, or soirées without the proper clothes, so Emily gets a new wardrobe at the world-famous House of Worth, on Mrs. Palmer’s dime. I like how McNamara conveys the couturier’s way of doing business, and the complex etiquette involved in fitting a client for a dress.

It’s at Worth that Bertha’s splendid pearl necklace disappears, and from there, the crimes multiply. Before long, a young woman is found strangled, and the French police suspect Mrs. Palmer’s son, Honoré, for the theft and the murder. Emily, who has solved cases in Chicago (this is McNamara’s sixth novel about her), sets about finding the truth. And the first place to look seems to be the confluence between fortune-hunting Europeans and Americans hoping to land an aristocratic marriage partner, a time-honored theme straight out of Henry James.

But Death at the Paris Exposition fails to deliver. Not one of the characters has angles or edges; everyone behaves true to form, which subverts any mystery. Honoré lives up to his name–respectful to ladies, dutiful to his parents, moderate in habits–so he can’t possibly be guilty, no matter how many times McNamara has Emily pretend to consider it. Conversely, another character acts and sounds like a fake–he’s clearly not an aristocrat–yet nobody seems to notice. And when he’s finally exposed, he drops the mask and reverts to “criminal” type, showing a “feral” expression, a cliché that thuds almost as loudly as the group scene convened for the purpose.

As a detective, Emily repeats rote, clunky phrases like “I needed to make the inspector turn his attentions away from Bertha and her family”; and whenever she mulls the case, she goes in circles, restating facts the reader knows. I’ve always thought that the pleasure of reading a mystery is matching wits with the sleuth. But if she doesn’t have any, where’s the challenge?

Nineteen-hundred was historically rich, and Paris is, well, Paris. Yet here, time and place are missing in action. McNamara spends paragraphs describing the clothes, but not a word on how it feels to wear them, aside from whether the women think they look attractive in them. Amazingly, even the exposition gets short shrift. Nothing in the story says, “This is 1900,” either in daily life or current events. No one breathes a word about the Boxer Rebellion, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, the assassination of the king of Italy (one of many by anarchists in those years), the American war in the Philippines, or McKinley’s reelection, to name only a few current issues that might have gotten Emily’s attention. As for contemporary mores, I can believe that she’d buy an English translation of an Émile Zola novel, but she’d have known that respectable women weren’t supposed to, and yet that never occurs to anyone. And since when do men wear hats in a Catholic church, as one character does at Notre Dame?

But it’s the prose that gives me the strongest sense of carelessness. When McNamara’s Parisians speak English (and a surprising number do), they sound like cartoon Frenchmen who have no real grasp of their native tongue. Sadly, that linguistic misery has plenty of company in the overall narrative. The author repeatedly confuses who and whom, writes sentences whose clauses fail to connect (sometimes humorously), and uses commas as if they were taxed. If you care about the art and craft of writing, a book like this can only be painfully disappointing–and I think McNamara’s editor bears a good part of the blame.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Brilliant, But a Little Mean: Leaving Lucy Pear

10 Monday Oct 2016

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Review: Leaving Lucy Pear, by Anna Solomon
Viking, 2016. 319 pp. $26

It’s summer 1917, and eighteen-year-old Beatrice Haven sneaks out of her uncle’s home at Cape Ann, Massachusetts, one night to leave her newborn infant in a pear orchard. Her act is desperate, of course, but not entirely random, for Bea anticipates that poachers from town will be coming to raid the orchard and will therefore find the child. What follows is beyond predictable, but Bea’s only thought–indeed, her only choice, as she sees it–is to save her baby from the orphanage. Further, that suits her purposes, for she plans to attend Radcliffe come the fall, though whether that notion is hers or belongs to her mother, Lillian, is an open question.

Bartolomeo Vanzetti, left, and Nicola Sacco, 1923 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons via Boston Public Library)

Bartolomeo Vanzetti, left, and Nicola Sacco, 1923 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons via Boston Public Library)

Meanwhile, the woman who picks up the infant girl is Emma Murphy, mother of eight, wife of a hard-drinking fisherman, Roland. The narrative shifts ahead to 1927, when Lucy Pear, as the foundling is called, is ten years old, and Emma has tired of her husband’s frequent absences and violent temper. She’s easy prey for Josiah Story, mayoral candidate and quarry manager, whose charm, money, and connections prove irresistible. Josiah arranges for Emma to tend Bea’s invalid Uncle Ira, who still lives in the house with the orchard. The job brings Emma needed money, a measure of independence from Roland, and puts her in Bea’s path, for that’s where she lives too. Radcliffe lasted barely a few months, and depression has immobilized her ever since.

So everybody’s got secrets, and cowardice has brought them about. Had Bea been able to stand up to her mother, she might not have made disastrous, self-destructive decisions. If Emma could face down her husband, she’d be better off, as would their children. And so on.

All those tightly contained secrets create an emotional pressure cooker, and Solomon exerts every ounce of tension imaginable, posing moral tests right and left that her characters often fail. I admire her refusal to protect them or ease their way; they’re no better than anyone else, and sometimes less. Yet the author never disengages to throw them in your lap, as if they were suddenly your problem. I think it takes courage to write like that, particularly when, more often than not, the publishing marketplace values the milk of human kindness, even–especially–if it’s artificially sweetened. Reading Leaving Lucy Pear, I’m reminded of the boldness of Philip Roth or Vladimir Nabokov–though she’s more merciful than they–and in most ways, it works for her.

I also admire Solomon’s way of illuminating psychological moments through superb prose:

Her mother looked at her tenderly and Bea felt swollen and strangled. She nearly began to speak. I am already so disappointed. She was stopped by fear: fear that if she started talking about herself, she would never stop; fear that her pain would fall out of her, grotesque, hairless, gasping, and she would not be able to stuff it back in.

All this makes Leaving Lucy Pear a gripping, painful, exceptionally well-observed narrative. And it’s also damned difficult to read, because the only truly sympathetic characters among a multitude are Lucy, Bea’s Uncle Ira, and her estranged husband, Albert. Tenderness is strictly rationed here, whereas hardness litters the ground, blocking every move, or so it seems. There’s a fine line between courageous, unflinching honesty and what can feel, at times, like authorial sadism. Solomon crosses it, I think, which makes her people difficult to sit with.

Similarly, I wonder why the Havens, wealthy Jews, must have no sense of their Jewishness except that they’re ashamed of it, Lillian especially, who’d do anything to pass. I get that Leaving Lucy Pear is partly about people afraid to be who they are, and that the historical background includes the Sacco-Vanzetti trial and the unabashed bigotry it aroused, an atmosphere from which nobody escapes. Even so, the portrayal has a mean edge, and the Havens’ self-hatred digs them a deeper hole than they already have as crass, disconnected, and (in Lillian’s case) manipulative people. Solomon rescues them, somewhat, by conveying how weak and fearful they are, and therefore still human. (Lucy, at age ten, is actually the strongest, most luminous character in the story, outshining both her mothers by far.) Yet Leaving Lucy Pear is a frightening, disturbing ride, and though I like the ending, I felt a bit bruised by the time I got there.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Vietnam, Up Close: The Man from Saigon

03 Monday Oct 2016

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Review: The Man from Saigon, by Marti Leimbach
Nan Talese/Doubleday, 2009. 342 pp. $26

Have you ever read a first-rate novel that still leaves you unsatisfied? For me, The Man from Saigon is one, because, good as it is, it should be ten times better. The subject is riveting, the writing sublime, and the plot couldn’t have more tension. Yet though I believe everything that happens to the characters, I don’t believe what happens between them.

You can’t argue with the premise, though, or with how Leimbach carries it out. It’s 1967, and Susan Gifford, who writes for a women’s magazine, goes to Vietnam to cover the war. The story follows her fumbling efforts to understand Saigon, where everything and everyone is for sale; the climate seems too crushing to withstand; and the American officers conducting press briefings treat her with even more contempt than they do her male colleagues. Susan quickly realizes that to file anything worthwhile, she must get up-country, which she does, with the help of Marc, a TV reporter, and Son, a Vietnamese photographer whom no one else trusts.

American soldiers carry a wounded comrade through a swamp in Vietnam, 1969 (Courtesy National Archives)

American soldiers carry a wounded comrade through a swamp in Vietnam, 1969 (Courtesy National Archives)

Leimbach renders these events so vividly that it’s as if you too were getting spat on by the teenage prostitutes on Tu Do Street, huddling in a bunker under bombardment firmly convinced that the next incoming shell will kill you, or watching an army surgeon coked on Dexadrine performing operations round the clock.

And then the story really kicks into gear. Susan and Son join a supply mission heading into the Mekong Delta, supposedly nothing dangerous. But the Viet Cong ambush the column, capture the two journalists, and set out to find their own unit, from which they too have become separated. They take Susan’s boots, spare clothes, and personal possessions, and though she tries, through Son, to explain that she’s not a spy, a soldier, or a threat, they can’t understand what she’s doing there or why. So beyond the cuts on her feet, which become infected, or feeling dizzy and faint from lack of food and water, she fears every second for her life and Son’s.

Leave a box of vegetables in the sun and that is the smell. Lie on asphalt at noon on an August day and that is the temperature. The heat rises from the ground, bombards you from above. The dense brush, the banyan trees, their branches intertwined, connect at the top to form a canopy, allowing no breeze. . . . She has been on such marches before, always with a company of Americans, always with Son who carried the bulk of the equipment. It is different now. A kind of timelessness has set in. She keeps thinking she is dying, that she is walking with a ghost.

I’ve read many eyewitness accounts of the Vietnam War, the centerpiece of my teenage years, but I’ve never read anything as visceral as The Man from Saigon. The pigheaded nature of American policy, the duplicity, the savagery on both sides, the corruption at every level, the misery and death–they’re all here, in beautifully rendered detail.

That said, however, for me, The Man from Saigon fails as anything other than a sort of journalistic fiction. Marc, the TV reporter, becomes Susan’s lover mostly because they share that terrifying bunker under fire. I’d believe that they might sleep together a few times, but not that Susan loves him, as she repeatedly claims. Their only common bond is a passion to know what the army refuses to let them see, and what lies they’re told instead, but otherwise, he’s a closed door. He says little or nothing about his life, feelings, dreams, or past–except that he’s married–and tries to drown his anxieties in drugs and alcohol. He’s got nothing to give her.

Then there’s Son, for whom her affection grows during their captivity, during which he treats her as kindly as he can, even tenderly, at moments. I think we’re meant to compare him to Marc. But Susan doesn’t know who Son really is, so can you call that love? Also, she suspects he’s working for Hanoi, yet somehow, that doesn’t matter; she never considers that his activities might cause many deaths, including those of her countrymen. About Vietnam, I’m as dovish as they come, yet I don’t see how you can duck that moral question; in war, no matter what you do, there are always consequences. And if Leimbach is trying to send a feminist message, that Son’s quiet tenderness beats Marc’s overt masculinity any day, I agree, but not because of what she writes. The narrative allows neither man much of an inner life, so the contrast feels superficial and set up–Son has a gentle character, whereas Marc has a job and an outlook. No contest, there.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.