Novel Without a Name
By Duong Thu Huong
Translated by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson
Picador, 1995. 289 pp., $16.95
Reviewed by Brendan Doyle
Author Duong Thu Huong was 21 when she led a Communist Youth Brigade to the most heavily bombarded front of the war in Vietnam. She spent the next seven years there, living in tunnels and underground shelters alongside North Vietnamese troops. Of her volunteer group of 40, she was one of three survivors. The novel is dedicated to "my friends who died, who live on in me".
The author was arrested and imprisoned without trial for seven months in 1991 on charges of having sent abroad documents containing state secrets. These "documents" were her own writings, including the manuscript of Novel Without a Name.
The narrator of the novel is Quan, a young man who joined the North Vietnamese army at 18, full of idealism for the Communist Party and the cause of national liberation. Ten years later, after leading his platoon through years of horror and deprivation, Quan, disillusioned with the struggle, undertakes a harrowing, solitary journey through the jungles of central Vietnam.
The novel is an unflinching portrayal of the obscenity of war. Early in the book, Quan and his platoon find the naked corpses of six mutilated women, volunteers from the north. "The soldiers had raped them before killing them. The corpses were bruised violet. So this was how graceful, girlish bodies rotted, decomposing into swollen old corpses, puffy as dead toads ... We gathered the corpses, fighting with the vultures and maggots for each shred of flesh."
Later, the now-starving platoon come across an orangutan in the jungle. They kill it and the cook makes it into a soup. The others laugh at Quan when he expresses disgust at eating this creature which is almost human. "I just stared at the tiny hands spinning in circles on the surface of the soup", says the narrator. The hands take him back to his childhood and the birth of his baby brother at the back of a pagoda. "Its feet kick the air, my face. I grab the tiny red feet and rub them against my cheek. 'Little brother. Little brother.'"
The unbearable present is relieved for Quan only by daydreams of a happy childhood with a mother he adored, playing with friends in the village, and the beauty of nature, even the bed of a dry stream where "a few puddles of water still glinted in the twilight like mirrors, fading from amber to rose and then violet."
Like other young men, Quan had joined the struggle with the highest ideals and dreams of glory in combat. "This was not simply another war against foreign aggression; it was also our chance for a resurrection. Vietnam had been chosen by History: After the war, our country would become humanity's paradise." But after 10 years of war he has become indifferent to the ideals that had taken him there. Quan is tortured by the feeling that "we had renounced everything for glory".
Utterly exhausted by the struggle and full of despair, Quan gets the chance to escape the routine horror for a time. He is sent on a mission to his native village, hundreds of kilometres away, to check up on Bien, a friend and fighter who has apparently gone crazy.
The rest of the book relates his experiences during his perilous journey across enemy-held territory, under US bombing raids. At the same time it is a journey back through his childhood, imagination and nightmares. In one such nightmare, he sees a black tidal wave that drowns everything and everyone, "the soldiers fighting in the name of nationalism, and us, the revolutionary army in the name of socialism ... This churning black tide that demolishes all borders, the mountains crowned with stars, the sun-drenched peaks, the church spires, the vast libraries piled up with all the ideologies, manifestos and polemics by all the balding, bearded geniuses ... Finished. There is no one left."
But he awakes to realise that he is still alive. Somehow he has survived a 10-year-long massacre. And the novel ends as it began, with the deaths of more friends in battle.
It is a tribute to Duong Thu Huong that she was able to transform her own experiences of that suffering into an eloquent book about the survival of human values even in the most barbaric wartime situations. It is a plea for sanity and respect for life, made all the more poignant by powerful imagery.