The Sympathizer is a novel which looks at the Vietnam War - especially the fall of Saigon and its aftermath - through the lens of a double agent. An officer in the South Vietnamese secret police, our narrator (whose name we never learn) is a secret Communist sympathizer whose double identity is the central organizing principle of this book.

My understanding is that Beloved was the first American book - certainly the most memorable - to describe slavery from the point of view of a slave. My guess is that the Sympathizer will serve a similar, if less biblically inflected, role for the Vietnam War: an American book that describes this traumatic war from the point of view of those who lived through it, as well as its aftermath.

So what, exactly, does that point of view look like? Well, it’s two or three points of view, to be precise. When we look at the war through the eyes of our narrator, it’s actually two points of view we get. It’s North vs. South, dragons vs. fairies, East vs. West, the French colonizers represented by his father vs. the rural peasants represented by his mother, Communist vs. Nationalist, and last but not least: self vs. story of self. Our narrator is without fail sympathetic to both sides of each of these divides. That is not just a personality quirk. I think it’s a way of crystallizing the experience of the war, which often required any single individual to simultaneously agree with the twin forces that were splitting the country in two, if for no other reason than to hedge one’s bets.

On the other hand, when we look at the war through the eyes of our narrator’s friends and comrades, there are actually three points of view, represented in turn by the narrator, his Nationalist friend Bon, and his Communist friend Man. These line up, more or less neatly, with the three parties to the Vietnamese War: the French, the Americans, and the Vietnamese people themselves. This perspective is a bit more muted than the narrator’s bipartite perspective, because we really only see it when the narrative swings around to describe what one or the other friend is doing. Yet I think this tripartite perspective is crucial, because it describes with the most force the author’s complaint against the parties who are responsible for destroying his country and its people. Who are those parties? Well, it’s everyone: the French, the Americans, and the Vietnamese themselves. Each of these characters is responsible for no small amount of suffering, though it’s difficult to pinpoint the one whose crimes are worst.

This entire book is, in more ways than one, one person’s attempt to tell the story of himself and his people. Most obviously: the author himself has stated that this book is a deliberate attempt to give voice to the experience of the Vietnamese people. As a structural matter, the first two-thirds or so of the story is structured as a confessional memoir: the narrator is literally telling some unidentified other person, indicated only by the title of Commandant, his life’s story. The narrator spends a good quarter or so of the book working on the script of a movie which tells the story of the Vietnam War for American audiences. This movie, which is probably a shadow for Apocalypse Now, is the narrator’s opportunity to represent his people as accurately as possible on the big screen; to control the means of representation, as Marxist dogma would have it. We later learn that the narrator’s efforts with the movie are in fact a sort of perverse recasting of his role within the South Vietnamese intelligence forces - a role which caused him to learn, and then to train others in, the brutal techniques needed to control a population, at a site euphemistically named the Movie Theater.

What, this book seems to ask, is the value or force of representation? How fiercely should we fight to contest an image? Much has been made of the American military’s obsession with enemy kill statistics during the Vietnam War, in service of pro-war propaganda. Nor were the Communists any fools with regards to propaganda: in many ways it was even more important to them. In this book we tackle these questions, and perhaps we have some form of an answer, which is that the people must represent themselves. As a piece of our understanding of the Vietnam War, this book is I think invaluable, more important than The Quiet American. It’s vital reading for anyone seeking to understand this part of history.