The wonderfully named Sydney Parade has ditched his wife and daughter to go to Vietnam. By exploiting a distant connection with a Frenchman named Claude, who has a rubber plantation in a remote part of the country, he learns the location of a captured American soldier.Sydney's boss is Dicky Rostok, a man who "always had a subtext more important than the text." Rostok's deputy is Pablo, a middle-aged colleague for whom Vietnam has become home. It is he who undertakes the soldier's retrieval.
Yet this is not a war story, as the narrator insists at the beginning of the book. There are no firefights. Nor is the writing is flashy. No postmodern tricks. Just a solid well-told tale with allegorical overtones.
The "dangerous friend" is Sydney, but more importantly it is also his country, for whom the captured soldier is a stand-in. "A big dumb blond," is how his CO describes him, "restless, eager to get back to the field, into action." What happens to him is, figuratively, what the conflict does to the US.
The book ends at the docks, where stevedores are "offloading America, the arsenal of democracy, its knowledge and its wealth, its optimism and industrial might. Typewriters, blackboards, two cases of thesauruses and three of dictionaries, cartons of envelopes and notepads, pencils, paper clips..."
Some of the scenes will stay with you long after the book has been put down.
