“I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook” so begins The Sympathizer, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
The narrator (who we will call Narr) is speaking not only to us but also to “the commandant” meaning he is a prisoner and we are hearing not so much a memoir as a confession. Narr is a communist spy entrenched in ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) working for “the General” but reporting to his North Vietnamese superiors.
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Eventually he will succumb to both the spy’s disease (not knowing for whom he is really working) and also to the revolutionary’s disease (destroying a tyrannical regime in order to replace it with an even more tyrannical one).
The first chapter takes place at Saigon airport in the last days of the war. It is hard to imagine a more dramatic scene. Gold, jewelry, currency, and bottles of Scotch are being traded for seats on the last planes out of Saigon. Narr is arranging seats for the general’s 92 relatives, servants, servants of relatives and relatives of servants.
Narr’s “back story” is that he is one of three boys, the others named Bon and Man, who had taken an oath of blood brotherhood.
In the end, this will prove more powerful than his ideological commitments. Narr, along with thousands of Vietnamese refugees, makes Los Angeles his new home. The narrative slows down here morphing into a refugee story which is one part poignant nostalgia and one part scorn for the condescension refugees receive from their American hosts.
What slows the narrative even more are the author’s ridiculously over the top metaphors. Some examples: “we heeded the call of the Katyusha rockets, hissing in the distance like librarians demanding silence.” or “he carried a baseball bat of integrity on his shoulder, ready to clobber the fat softballs of his opponents’ inconsistencies.”
The best set-piece in this interval is Narr’s work as a cultural advisor on a movie set in which the “definitive” cinematic version of the Vietnam War is to be created.
The general decides it is time to recruit a new Vietnamese army to liberate the homeland from the Communists. Before, he can take part Narr must convince the ever suspicious general of his loyalty by executing two Vietnamese believed to be Communist agents confusing him even more as to which side he is on. The military adventure is brief and Narr is captured by his own side.
But is it still his own side? His interrogation lasts a year because he never seems to get the tone of his confession right. Why is the new regime suspicious of their faithful servant? Because he has “traveled to strange lands and been exposed to some dangerous ideas. It wouldn’t do to bring infectious ideas into a country unused to them.”
But friendship prevails. The commissar of his detention camp is his old blood brother Man, who arranges his escape from Vietnam but not before Narr understands that “our revolution had gone from being the vanguard of political change to the rearguard hoarding power.”
Sympathizer is about the vagaries and complexities of loyalty, but loyalty to whom or to what? Nation, family, friendship, employer, ideology? And the novel also prompts readers to ask the question: How many times must revolutionaries reinvent the wheel? We all remember the screams at the guillotine. Must we keep revisiting them?