The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Darkness of Democracy

When Donald Trump blasts "Make America Great Again", it may not be obvious that 'again' has a very specific historical reference: the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the day the United States lost its first war. This event opens The Sympathizer. The Donald cannot mention Vietnam; it is still too painful and embarrassing a topic in American politics even after more than 40 years. There was no attack on a US ship in the Tonkin Gulf, there were no dominoes waiting to fall, there were no oppressed freedom-loving people to defend. These were fabrications.

The Vietnam War in the US has the same emotional significance as the First World War to Germany during the Weimar Republic. It is a reminder of not just defeat, and government deceit but of purported betrayal by one's fellow countrymen - hippies, liberals, draft dodgers, inconstant politicians. The fact that Trump arranged to have himself exempted from being drafted into the Vietnam War - through equivalent fabrication - makes him even more emotionally dedicated to ensuring his own past disappears into that period when America believed itself not just courageous, and honest but competent, and above all exceptional among nations. His recent attack on former Vietnamese prisoner of war John McCain as a 'loser' was not so much personal as a metaphysical rejection of Trump's as well as the country's own history.

This novel is acutely prescient not only about the archetypal American/Trumpian neurosis, which it satirises so mercilessly, but also about the political effects of that neurosis. The conflict in Vietnam has become an historical metaphor for what is happening in American politics as I write this review. The route from Weimar to National Socialism in the Germany of the 1930's, as many have already noted, has much the same scenery as the rise of Trump. The similarity is not congenial to many Americans. Nguyen's staging of the problem of America in Vietnam is therefore brilliant. That he doesn't provide a happy dénouement is simply prudence not lack of imagination. Many others who have studied the problem reach a similar impasse.

For example, in 1943, two weeks before her death, the young philosopher Simone Weil wrote a short essay 'On the Abolition of All Political Parties'. In it she distinguishes the meaning and practice of political parties in continental Europe and the Anglo-Saxon world of America and Britain. Both types involve the passionate espousal of a point of view on the shape and content of the general good. Weil likes neither type - the British because, although it dissipates passions, the result is compromise which everyone can accept but no one really wants. The continental, because it enflames passions to the point where Jacobin ferocity puts "one party in power and all the others in jail". Frustration with the former naturally leads to the latter.

The slide from reason to controllable passion to Gnostic dictatorship in which each party accuses the other, not only of error but of the vile civil evil of treason is, Weil implies, inevitable. This she foresees is the real threat of and to democracy: the corruption of the souls and consciences of those who participate in party politics. It is difficult not to perceive in the recently held Republican National Convention precisely this slide from rational perception of one's personal interests to the ultimate demonisation of the other side as perverts, traitors and liars: "Hillary for Prison", "Hillary the Traitor of Benghazi".

The Sympathizer is in large part about Weil's inevitable slide into the abyss of party politics. The locus is not Cleveland (although much of the book takes place in America) and the protagonist is not American (but significantly European/Asian). Nevertheless the not-so-hidden force of the narrative is American culture and American military and political power in the character of the mysterious Claude. One clue to the metaphorical intent of the book is that Claude (and his intellectual avatar Hedd) is apparently the only proper name in the book. The other characters are either roles - the Captain, the General, the Auteur, the Parisian aunt, the crapulent major - or veiled descriptors in languages other than English - Man, Bon, Sofia Mori. What the named character of Claude promotes is simply the creation and the continuing passionate hatred and conflict between the two historical factions of Vietnamese before during and after the war. He plots and meddles and tortures and encourages strife endlessly, not for any obvious ideology or advantage but just because he can.

Claude is America and what America does - not just to others but to itself. Not until halfway through the book, despite several hints, does it become apparent that it is actually about representative democracy not Vietnam: "Not to own the means of production can lead to premature death, but not to own the means of representation is also a kind of death." muses the spy-protagonist who is having a rather different kind of political awakening than he anticipated during his life in the West. The real question is how anyone can be politically represented. Neither liberal democracy nor the dictatorship of the proletariat makes a satisfactory solution to the problem. All politics fail from time to time. Perhaps not inevitably as Weil feared, but certainly when it comes under control by the Claudes of the world.

Donald Trump is the potentially fatal flaw in American representative democracy. Clearly Nguyen knew nothing of Trump's prospective rise to political fame as he wrote. But he didn't need to. Trump is a type, the dark side of America that lurks constantly in wait to mug the entire country, and as much of the rest of the world that is within reach. It is this dark side which is so obvious to non-Americans, especially non-European non-Americans. And it is this side which Nguyen describes with such horrible accuracy. A timely reminder therefore of the real danger we face.

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