Love affairs, revenge and secrets
A Hundred Suns a historical novel set in French Indochina
A Hundred Suns Karin Tanabe
St. Martin’s
Decades before America’s epic debacle in Vietnam, France had its own. Karin Tanabe sets her new novel, A Hundred Suns, in French-occupied Indochina and aims to examine the ugly implications of French colonialism.
The novel, Tanabe’s fourth, opens in November 1933 in the Hanoi train station, dubbed “the house of a hundred suns” given its position as hub of Indochina’s railway system.
Protagonist Jessie Lesage is American, married to a Michelin rubber heir. She grew up poor and abused in Virginia and is fluent in French, thanks to her French-canadian mother.
Jessie fights her way from her fraught childhood home to Paris, where she becomes a teacher.
How she meets her wealthy, French husband is one of many tightly held secrets. She is excited to arrive in Indochina with her husband and young daughter. There, where costs are low, her family can “finally live like Michelins.”
Her story intertwines with that of Marcelle de Fabry, a French woman who lands in Hanoi in pursuit of her lover Khoi, heir to a silk fortune.
Marcelle immediately befriends Jessie and is quick to provide advice — “Relax, my dear. ... This is Hanoi. It’s so much better than real life.” It soon becomes clear that the lovely and demure Jessie has much to hide if she is to carry out her role of enlightened French colonizer. Marcelle, too, is freighted with secrets, intent on avenging the death of a beloved friend, a communist sympathizer who was murdered.
Tanabe, a former reporter for Politico, did extensive research on the French role in Indochina.
She pored over government documents and paints a picture of gross exploitation, including murder on the rubber plantations and other ruthless efforts to quell communist leaders whose aim was to bring education and health care to workers and their families, and to raise starvation wages.
This is a book of secrets, but not of great subtlety. Where the reader could have been left to make inferences, the characters spell out their emotional conditions.
The plot moves quickly, often in long passages of expository dialogue. Jessie, it turns out, is being gaslit from multiple corners.
It will take her the length of the book to untangle what is happening to her, and why.
None of the main characters comes through unscathed; each has reasons for obfuscating.
A Hundred Suns has a cinematic quality — which may be telling, given that Tanabe’s second novel, The Gilded Years, is being made into a film starring Zendaya.
This view of French occupation in Indochina is replete with love affairs, revenge and secrets, not to mention a history lesson about the evils of colonialism.