the sympathiser (viet thanh nguyen)

This novel has drifted around the edge of my consciousness for a while, popping up on recommended lists, getting mentions. Finally, as novels do, it arrived in my library. Reading it, it felt as though the author tackled two of the great fulcrums of modern English language novel writing. On the one hand, that twentieth century relic, the great American novel; on the other the twenty first century injunction to explore the immigrant’s story, the point at which cultures collide. 

The two cultures in this case are Vietnam and the USA. The book’s narrator suffers from being a direct genetic product of this clash, his father a US missionary, his mother a teenage victim of the missionary’s seduction. As such, the anonymous narrator is already damned to be neither/ nor, and at the same time blessed, able to view both cultures from the other’s standpoint, and enjoy the best and worst of them. The story’s pivotal moment is the fall of Saigon, which sends the narrator into exile in his father’s country. He flees as the adjutant of a Vietnamese general. However, the narrator, we learn, is also a Vietcong spy. 

These highly literary paradoxes, the bastard’s paradox, as Edmund probably said, are the scaffolding on which a big beast of a novel is hung. The outsider’s viewpoint allows for some eviscerating reflections on both cultures in a prose that stings with its wit. However, for all its undoubted brilliance, I also ended up feeling as though the book missed a few targets. The great ideological divide, for which Vietnam became a military-political experiment, is something the book and the narrator dance around as much as they interrogate. The closing chapters, oddly reminiscent of Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, seem to strive to compensate for the book’s somewhat prosaic earlier treatment of politics, with a detailed account of the narrator’s political re-education through torture. The Vietcong employ methods learned from their enemy, the CIA, in a lengthy process that pushes the narrator towards mysticism. Furthermore, that tedious trope of modern literary criticism, the one that says we have to ‘care’ about the characters, feels for once as though it might have a point. As the narrator becomes more and more steeped in blood, rather than feeling for him or his victims or even those on the periphery, the reader ends up feeling as little sympathy as the narrator apparently does for those who he helps to despatch to the next world. 

All of which is not to negate the book’s scale, scope and the brilliance of the author’s language. It’s just that, as the linguistic fire and brimstone become assimilated into the reading experience, the tragedies that underpin the novel seem to drift further and further out of view, like a boat lost on the horizon, gradually slipping away.