A Kind of Allegory

...There is the National Liberation Front leader who tells Mallory that the Vietcong is just a popular resistance movement which, though not now controlled by the Communists, will eventually see the wisdom of the Communist system...

...Then he goes on a few military operations where the Vietcong have obviously had advance warning, and his efforts to find the informer become more than a bothersome yet lucrative charge...

...We must stay and fight, however hopeless it appears, and hope we can hold on until the other side begins to change because it realizes that it can't win...

...Elegant never really says, except, perhaps, by a continuation of the Mallory-U.S...

...But it is too late for Mallory...

...The slot-machine and hamburger world of the American officers' clubs has taken precedence over the languid elegance of the Cercle Sportif and the headier pleasures of the Cholon gambling clubs...

...His piece for Quest did not get quite the space he had hoped for, but it was well received...

...What is Elegant's, or at least Mallory's, prognosis...

...Whatever Elegant's primary motivations, he probably could not write a novel on Vietnam devoid of political commentary, and his is extremely thoughtful and perceptive...

...allegory...

...When he draws up a list of suspects, the ciA nervously orders him to drop the whole thing...

...We must stay and fight it out," Mallory tells Tuyelle, "knowing we can't gain any decisive victory...

...But this is the first of what is likely to be a long line of novels about the post-Diem American era of Vietnamese history: There are more Americans there now, and fewer Frenchmen, and many of the bars have English names...

...The engagé guy, Johnny Humboldt, the counterpart of Greene's quiet American, is killed, possibly by suicide, a few minutes after Mallory's plane lands at Tansannhut airport...

...There is the liberal Senator who thinks that the U.S...

...He could write his story, collect the fee, marry the girl, and withdraw to the safety and comfort of Hong Kong...

...And if not, why were the leaks continuing...

...Elegant's Saigon, like Greene's and Shaplen's, is still a world of intrigue, of plots-withinplots, of double-agents and interagency in-fighting, where no one is really sure who is on whose side, and only the naive believe there are only two sides to the war...

...Mallory meets some of Humboldt's friends, a discussion group of Vietnamese intellectuals and a few Frenchmen and Americans presided over by Dr...

...The hero, at the book's end, is reasonably happy...

...Blocked by the CIA and stymied by lack of clues, Mallory half decides to give up his spy hunt, since he really has neither the will nor the power to carry it through...

...has gone about this thing all wrong and all you have to do is "cut the taproot of discontent...

...The rue Catinai is now called Tu Do, but the Hotel Majestic where Elegant's hero stays is the same place where Graham Greene's hero and heroine met, though the beautiful girls in ai-daos who sit in its cafe now speak better English...

...Like the British journalist in Graham Greene's The Quiet American, Mallory, when he arrives in Saigon, is a pretty degagé guy...

...Elegant's villain has staked his future on the Vietcong, since they have "both a specific desire and the will to pursue it...

...There is the resident American publisher-businessman who says that our misguided liberal diplomats betrayed Diem and now there is nothing left to us but to assume direct power from the "Boy Scout generals...

...Thau argues that Vietnam is a test case, but Mallory is not convinced...

...He visits opium den-brothels and gets himself in dirty pictures, is trailed by a bizarre Eurasian in sun glasses, gets shot at by the Vietcong and abducted by evil men in lurid pop-art masks, and does some spare-time spying for the CIA...

...Until he has finished what he started, he can't even make love to his girl properly...

...Graham Greene's The Quiet American and Robert Shaplen's A Forest of Tigers come to mind...

...it's greatness isn't at stake in Vietnam...

...All of which raises the obvious question: Is this merely a good-fun, money-making venture or a political treatise...

...the CIA operatives who aren't sure which side their double-agents are helping more...

...What are the odds...

...His characters beautifully highlight the dangers and frustrations bound up with the management of the war: the big-shot TV commentator who comes out to Saigon with the definitive word from the President...

...Mallory, in his triple role as reporter for a slick magazine called Quest, intelligence gatherer for the CIA and lover of Humboldt's exgirlfriend Tuyelle, has to find out whether Humboldt was guilty...

...Maybe, he muses, the United States ought to do likewise: get out, cut its losses and salvage whatever honor it still has...

...After these "solutions" and their proponents are pretty thoroughly discredited, what is left...

...Yet Saigon remains, in some respects, much the same...

...the PIO Colonel who can't find out enough information about the death of an officer to invent a good cover story...

...But while pulling off a novel which is bound to look great in technicolor and paperback, Elegant has also managed to make political sense...

...There is still pretty good French and excellent Chinese food in the restaurants, and endless cocktail parties where political prognoses are passed around with the Hors d'oeuvres...

...He's divorced, smokes Camels, has a crew cut, and sleeps in an orange plaid sarong...

...he is getting too close to their double-agent...

...His book on Vietnam might not turn out to be a best-seller, but it seemed sure of a respectable sale...

...and he's about to marry the heroine...

...He drinks giant-sized Martinis, consumes frequent bottles of champagne (Dom Pérignon and occasionally Krug extra brut), and has a favorite kind of brandy whose manufacture is erotically described...

...The fact that the setting is contemporary Saigon, a place now known to a few hundred thousand Americans, should clinch it for Hollywood...

...In the end, he narrowly escapes death by shooting the grotesque fatman villain in the stomach and wins the girl, a beautiful Vietnamienne named Tuyelle...

...He might not be standing on the pinnacle, but he had come a long way back up the slopes In places, A Kind of Treason gets a bit thick in melodrama, and its plot sometimes seems rather haphazardly contrived...

...America can make a stand elsewhere, where there's more help and a stable government...

...The author of A Kind of Treason is a top foreign correspondent (now Los Angeles Times Hong Kong bureau chief and a long-time contributor to this magazine...

...But too much is at stake, too many men and women we can't abandon, nor to speak of our own honor...

...Thau, an aging and shelved politician...

...Reviewed by ANNE HENEHAN Executive Secretary, American Friends of Vietnam Gerry Mallory, the journalisthero of Robert S. Elegant's novel, is a sort of existential, middle-aged James Bond whose personality and exploits seem ready-made for the movies...

...the endless procession of visiting Senators gathering irrefutable, eye-witness evidence to back up their own opinions...

...Mallory scores the disunity and inefficiency of the Vietnamese and advocates taking the National Liberation Front into the government and guaranteeing South Vietnam's neutrality with American air and sea power...

...Too many characters have eyes like "liquid drops of iodine' or similar traits, and the hero runs his hand across his crewcut a few times too often for this to be meant as anything other than a popular, somewhat tonguein-cheek suspense epic...

...he is already committed, engag...

...One of the group accuses the Americans of fighting a phony war, of committing just enough power to prevent the Vietcong from winning, but not enough to defeat them...

...The United States possesses neither" But Mallory, conceding that there must be some good reason why "these people are beating hell out of us," opts for the existential responsibility inherent in the nonideological system, "the pain of the perpetual indecision which is the fate of men who are not fanatics, that perpetual indecision through which they must always choose not the single correct path, but only the path which seems best at the moment...

...And if the United States keeps pushing the rock up the hill, will it get us an honorable settlement in Vietnam...

...From this point on, A Kind of Treason can be read as a kind of allegory...

...There have been other novels in English set in Saigon...

...He has written several serious non-fiction books on Asia, notably The Dragon's Seed...

...The favorite topic of discussion, quite naturally, is the war...

...who was taking Humboldt's place...

...Like everybody in real-life Saigon, too, Elegant's characters all have their pet political theories and solutions...

...And, of course, there is still the jungle-war outside which occasionally impinges on the life of the city...

...Mallory is a reporter, and reporters, strictly speaking, are not supposed to have any theories...

...Humboldt, the idealist, the thinker, had been suspected of passing information on planned military operations to the Vietcong...

...So, one assumes, will the United States lose its potency unless it carries out its responsibilities...