JOURNEY TO 1908 SAIGON
Debut novel from B.C. author
A budget Honduran hotel, a backwater in Texas, a leper colony near Vancouver Island: a key attribute of Floating Like The Dead, Yasuko Thanh’s debut story collection, was the inspired choice of settings.
For her first novel, Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains, the Victoria-based author zeros in on Saigon circa 1908.
Under French military control since the late 1850s and dismissed by one of the novel’s characters as “a nothing town with two dirty streets that ran the length of a river,” in Thanh’s telling Saigon is fetid but bright with tropical flowers. Choked with blood, disease, abuse, and corpses, it’s also profoundly tense from warring ideologies and opposed political forces (and the resentment, brutality, and dreams of retribution that result from them).
While the historical reality of that “nothing town” rightly captivates the author, the puzzling story she builds about it lacks sureness. It’s as if in being overwhelmed by the maze of bygone Saigon’s narrow corridors, Thanh lost her footing.
Disappointment aside, the uncertainty is a shame too. Just as Emma Donoghue and Guy Vanderhaeghe transformed historical footnotes into spellbinding fictive meditations on national histories, Thanh’s starting point — the Saigon Poisoning Plot — is an obscure event with tremendous promise. That failed attempt by Vietnamese nationalists to kill a garrison of French troops ended with dozens of death sentences. For unclear reasons, Thanh decides on vastly different fates for its architects.
Thanh’s opening chapters delve into the conflicted desires of Georges-Minh Nguyen. An affluent esthete and armchair radical with a growing appetite for opium, he’s also a French-educated doctor who hosts a twicemonthly meeting for a handful of fellow activists. Posturing anti-imperialists, they scheme while often setting that aside to gossip or debate about their subversive group’s name. Their provisional choice: Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains.
Distraught about his wealth, sexuality, and political stasis, Georges-Minh impulsively marries. His opium intake increases too.
Thanh rapidly moves proceedings from the doctor’s salon to the mean streets of Saigon, which fester with prostitution, violence, “marsh fever,” and the repressive actions of foreign invaders — as well as with an active economy founded on divination and the vengeful “hungry ghosts” that haunt households. Yet, the more attention Thanh gives to diversifying subplots and new character arcs, the more the momentum she inaugurated with the poison plot lessens. Well past the novel’s midpoint, one of Georges-Minh’s pals complains about the group’s inaction: “Too much thinking, not enough action.” The reader can’t help but agree.
Eventually, the poison plot fizzles; the panicked co-conspirators flee toward the untamed coast and into Heart of Darkness territory.
Along the way, Thanh’s problematic narration is strewn with anachronisms.
There are references to everything from a flame-thrower (military usage of which began in the First World War) to, repeatedly, all-purpose vitamins ( Vitamins A through D were discovered between 1910 and 1920). Post-1908 terms like “junky,” psychological “baggage,” “sociopath,” “turning tricks,” “designer jacket,” “latent adolescent anger,” and “shops of the retail centre” appear regularly. A character describes himself as “gay,” “decompresses” by working long hours, and prefers a “minimalist look” as decor.
Another says, “In hindsight everything appears twenty-twenty, so they say.” They did say that, though starting the 1940s. Instead of immersing readers in bygone Saigon and evoking the era’s specificity, Thanh draws attention to missteps. The net effect: diminished confidence in the storyteller’s capability to aptly represent the era and tell its truths.
Similarly, while Thanh’s usual eloquence runs through the chapters, other hiccups create unsettling rhythms. They’re unexpectedly abundant, from clichés like “nick of time” to “the jig was up” to overwrought metaphor chains and ornate but unilluminating descriptions.
She writes, “Yet the moment-to-moment sufferings, the unkind looks, the harsh words were a burnt offering unto them. They fuelled the memories of the shores upon which she’d been shattered. Kerosened them. Stoked them.”
A few pages earlier: “She’d been shattered on the shores of his death.” Or: “Her skin was the colour of fried ginger when you first throw it in the pan. When the oil has just become hot enough to scent the air and cause tiny bubbles to appear around the base of the wooden chopstick lowered into it to test the temperature.”
Struggling to navigate a vexing phrase of metaphors or unpack a needlessly complicated account of skin hue, a reader’s attention necessarily withdraws from the portrait before them.
Shortcomings aside, there’s no denying the author’s artful eye. It’s what I’ll keep in mind when hearing of Thanh’s future undertakings.
Brett Josef Grubisic teaches English literature at UBC. From Up River and For One Night Only, his third novel, comes out in April.