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| Review: The Man From Saigon |
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| I was very lucky to get this nice review from the Daily Mail yesterday. Okay, they had a little problem with me not going into Son's story but it would have been impossible to do so without risking a lot else that makes the book work. I was very pleased with this review anyway -- the first one.
In a change of direction from an author best known for her involving family dramas, Marti Leimbach strikes out for the battlefields of Vietnam.
It's 1967 and, to her surprise, journalist Susan Gifford realises she's acquired a reputation among her magazine colleagues as the kind of quirky, intrepid girl who's up for an adventure.
Sent to Saigon to cover human interest stories, her experience of the war comes to be defined by her relationships with two very different men: hard-bitten, cynical - and married - American television war correspondent Marc, whom she meets and falls in love with while under artillery fire; and Hoang Van Son, a Vietnamese photographer - gentle, calm, thoughtful - who offers Susan the protection of his friendship.
Marc instinctively distrusts him, but when Susan and Son are captured by three hapless Viet Cong soldiers, her own instincts are tested to their limit.
Leimbach does an impressive job of evoking the frenetic chaos of Saigon and the claustrophobia and suffocating humidity of the dense jungle, while her story has a vivid immediacy as it flashes backwards and forwards in a deliberately disorienting fashion. The result is intense and gripping, although - perhaps inevitably for such an elusive shape-shifter - there's an empty space at the heart of this unusual love triangle where Son's story should sit.
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| Tuesday, June 02, 2009 | 10:43:48 |
