Book – The Sympathizer

Author: Viet Thanh NguyenPublisher: CorsairReviewer: Stephen Keim

The Sympathizer is framed as a confession of a prisoner addressed to the commandant of the prison in which he is detained. The narrator, who is the sympathizer of the title, is never identified by name, even as the sympathizer of the title. The identity of the commandant is one of the great plot twists of the book, indeed, one of the great plot twists in literature.

The circumstances of the narrator – past and present – are revealed by the confession. Indeed, the confession is much criticised by commandant and his assistant, the commissar, for its rambling nature, more like a novel than a confession.

The Sympathizer is a response to American and, more generally, western coverage of the Vietnam war. Vietnamese people are invisible in most such coverage except as objects against which American heroes vaunt their heroism.

Nguyen constructs his first person narrator as the perfect vehicle through which a more nuanced and less monolithic portrayal may be achieved. The opening two sentences of The Sympathizer reads: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps, not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.”

At the beginning of the novel, the narrator is a captain in the Vietnamese army. He is assigned to the counter-espionage section of the Republic of Vietnam’s police force. As a result, he is expected to interrogate and torture suspected Viet Cong spies and operatives. He is the trusted aide-de-camp of the general in charge of that section of the police force.

The narrator has a mentor and handler, Claude, who is a CIA officer responsible for assisting the counter-espionage work of the RVN. Claude is a very charming and likeable figure who carries more than a passing resemblance to the eponymous Quiet American of Graham Greene’s novel set two decades earlier in a similar part of Indochina. Claude saw the latent talent of the narrator when the narrator was just nine years old and had mentored him and assisted his education and career development since that time. The education had included time in an American college which the narrator had used well to develop proficiency in understanding American culture and an ability to understand and to communicate with Americans.

It is Claude who carefully taught the narrator and the fellow members of his cohort in the sophisticated techniques of psychological torture used by the CIA and expected of those recruits in their important work. It is Claude who, approvingly, supervises the narrator’s work when he is called to exercise his techniques upon suspects who are fellow Viet Cong. He must, of course, do such work with appropriate skill and intensity so as not to blow the cover of his important placement at the heart of the enemy’s intelligence apparatus.

The narrator is one of a trio of blood brothers who, as teenagers, had cut their respective wrists and merged their actual blood promising eternal loyalty to one another. The other two are Bon and Man. This loyalty and love have been maintained despite Bon’s enthusiastic membership of the RVN military and his love of killing in the interests of his cause. And this loyalty has persisted despite, unbeknownst to Bon, both Man and the narrator being devoted spies for the Viet Cong. Indeed, Man is higher in the organisation and operates as the narrator’s handler receiving his information and directing his spying activities.  

The Sympathizer opens in the final days of the surrender of Saigon. The narrator is organising, in liaison with, and receiving assistance from, Claude, the escape of his general and his family and his hangers on in one of the last planes to depart the capital. Both the general and Man make the decision that the narrator should leave on the plane. In consultation with the general, the narrator gets to make most of the decisions as to who will be on that plane and who will miss out. As part of his devotion to Bon, he makes sure there are places for Bon and his wife and child.

The action moves forward to the new life in America with the narrator still acting as the general’s right-hand man, assisting the general and his family with coping with the new life in an unwelcoming country which makes little allowance for the important positions they once held in a country treated as one of America’s most important allies and strategic assets. He is also required to assist with the general’s grandiose plans to re-conquer his former home in a guerilla infiltration across the Laotian border via Thailand. When the general, in his paranoia, decides that one of his former majors may be a spy whom the narrator must arrange to assassinate, Bon’s love of killing is of great assistance to the narrator.

As the action goes forward, the confession also goes back, giving important background to the narrator’s position. The narrator is the product of a liaison between a French Catholic priest and one of his devoted practitioners. These familial origins make the narrator a perpetual outsider, looked down upon by his Vietnamese peers and regarded as Asian by westerners, whether European or American. The Catholic priest father is neither remorseful nor conscious of any fatherly duty and seems to go out of his way to make the narrator’s childhood as poor and unpleasant as possible. The narrator more than hints that his inability to truly belong, or his corresponding ability to belong everywhere, assist him in the double lives he must live as a spy.    

The Sympathizer is a satire in which no one is spared, especially not the narrator himself. In the narrator’s case, his love life after the return to America is a source of much humour. In addition, American cruelty and hypocrisy comes through strongly in the actions and personality of Claude. Nor are the Vietnamese supporters of the RVN or the Viet Cong spared criticism.

The Sympathizer, because of its satire and despite the suffering it portrays, is extremely funny. Comparisons with Catch 22 are not misplaced. Craziness and disorder infect every aspect of the action.

In his new life in America, the narrator gets to engage with the maker of a proposed new film on the Vietnam war. Reluctantly at first but, later, with apparent conviction, the filmmaker hires the narrator as a consultant for the making of the film in the Philippines in order to ensure that the Vietnamese people are fairly portrayed in the film. He becomes a wrangler of the actors hired to play Vietnamese characters, and not much more. His presence provides PR cover for the filmmaker’s unaltered intentions to make the most American of American films, projecting the country’s centuries long belief in its manifest destiny as God’s special country.

This setup allows The Sympathizer to satirise United States filmmaking, especially, when it seeks to portray other cultures and, especially, when the subject matter is war. The most obviously likely target of the satire is Apocalypse Now, but the lesson applies equally to most genres, including the western and its portrayal of native Americans.

The Sympathizer is an engaging and enjoyable read. While the comparisons with Catch 22 and The Quiet American should not be pushed too far, the reader’s enjoyment and desire to read just one more chapter, before midnight strikes and the light must definitely be turned off, is no less than with those two classics.

Just as importantly, The Sympathizer does succeed in presenting a nuanced view of the conflict it portrays. Even when satire is most scorching in its treatment of an individual, a movement, an organisation or a culture, empathy is present at the same time and the reader understands what is seeking to be achieved and through what cultural prisms the world is being perceived.      

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a massive talent. The Sympathizer creates a genre of its own and Nguyen is an active writer continuing to publish new works which are likely to challenge our expectations of what a writer can achieve. The Sympathizer was published in 2015. His treasure trove of subsequent books can be found here.