An Honourable Exit
This history of French commercial and military activity in Indo China (later Vietnam) is presented as a novel, but to cover the period between the 1920s and the 1970s, with scores of characters – businessmen, politicians, generals – in such a slim volume inevitably means that the narrative style owes more to non-fiction than fiction. There are moments of very lively, indeed scurrilous, writing – usually deployed to point out how unattractive the French were, in using their colonial troops to suppress freedom fighters in their former colony, a colony which had contributed vast wealth to France through the ruthless exploitation of such workers as those harvesting latex rubber for the Michelin tyre company. The central episode is the debacle at Dien Bien Phu, when a besieged French army, comprising Foreign Legion, Vietnamese loyalist and colonial troops raised in North and West Africa, attempting to defend a valley (Vuillard memorably likens it to a chamber pot), is eventually almost wiped out.
But he chooses not to provide any descriptions of the courage of the defenders, nor indeed of the attackers. I suspect anyone coming to this book without prior knowledge of the history may feel short-changed, for Vuillard’s polemical writing focuses on judgements rather than descriptions. An interesting little book, pushing the bounds of the non-fiction novel, and (it would seem) very well translated, this is certainly an enjoyable read, at times grimly comical. But it would have been greatly improved, and would attract more English-speaking readers, if this edition had been accompanied by a factual description of the Dien Bien Phu campaign and the battle.
