An invasion of Vietnam

As a historical novel about France’s entry into Indochina at the end of the 18th century, “Le Colonial” is undoubtedly relevant to the French and Vietnamese. But such is the turn of history that it also has considerable import for Americans, and not just those of Vietnamese ancestry.

The United States, as France did two centuries before, thrust itself into distant Vietnam, and the consequences of doing so have not yet fully played out.

The book’s author, Kien Nguyen, was born in the seaside South Vietnamese town of Nha Trang, the son of an American father and a Vietnamese mother who now is an American writer living in California. He wrote the acclaimed and moving memoir of his harrowing childhood, “The Unwanted,” and the novel “The Tapestries,” about his grandfather, who was an embroiderer at the court of the last emperor of Vietnam.

In “Le Colonial,” Nguyen shows an implicit awareness of the events of the 20th century even as his tale is of the 18th and early 19th centuries. It begins in France in 1771, in Avignon, where the Jesuit Msgr. Pierre Pigneau de Behaine is recruiting novices to join him on his return voyage to gain converts and save souls in Annam, the central part of what is now Vietnam. The priest had a larger goal than he let on. He wanted to present the king of France with a rich new piece of empire, whose acquisition would be of benefit to the Jesuit order.

He gains one convert, an artist, Francois Gervais, who in turn recruits a younger man to help him. Perhaps the title of the book -- in English, “The Colonial” -- refers to De Behaine, maybe to all three Frenchmen as a kind of abstract collective or perhaps to France itself. No matter. “Le Colonial” signifies doom.

As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that the Frenchmen, for all their religious and nationalist ardor, have no business being in Indochina. They understand very little about the place, which is plagued by warfare and riven by regional and personal rivalries.

Nguyen describes Indochina’s Buddhism (itself an import) with more sympathy than he portrays French Catholicism. Yet in his tale, as in history, the French Catholics prevail for about a century and a half. De Behaine was the historical character who took advantage of the discord in the ruling Nguyen family and installed Nguyen Anh as the reigning emperor (crowned Gia Long). He founded the dynasty that ruled a united Vietnam under French protection until the middle of the 20th century. Then the Vietnamese drove out the French, who were followed by their American substitutes.

This feckless history -- of armed intervention from halfway around the world on an ancient culture -- haunts Nguyen’s novel and gives it such force as it has. His scenes of floods, battles, trumpeting elephants and the elaborate pageantry of an Asian court are vividly memorable. His prose, which in “The Unwanted” was spare, supple and natural, is, alas, in “Le Colonial” a jumble of flat cliches, and his dialogue sounds as if it came straight from a melodramatic B movie. Even so, Nguyen’s story is a strong and cautionary tale for 21st century America.