Customer Reviews

The Cambodia File

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This is the story of two people caught up in the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia in 1975: An American embassy staffer (David) and his Khmer mistress Kim. David is forced to flee the country and Kim refuses to go with him, thinking that the Khmer Rouge can't be all bad. Soon she is enslaved in a labor camp, watching people around her die of starvation and in summary executions. David mourns her loss, but soon falls in love with an aid worker who runs camps on the Thai-Cambodian border. Kim finally escapes and they meet again, but by then their romance has faded.

I picked up this novel because of Jack Anderson's fame and notoriety as an investigative journalist who let America in on some closely-guarded secrets such as the Iran-Contra scandal and the CIA's plot to assassinate Castro. The book has some minor historical significance as one of the first popular works to depict the horror of the Pol Pot regime; indeed, Anderson began writing the book while Pol Pot was still in power, although it wasn't published until 1983.

Anderson won acclaim (and a Pulitzer) for his highly accurate journalism, combining exhaustive research with probing interviews to expose startling and often disturbing truths about politics and government. His motivation for writing The Cambodia File was partly to decry the brutal heartlessness of the US Government in carpet-bombing eastern Cambodia and then abandoning the devastated nation to the Khmer Rouge, but also to portray the ruthless insanity of the Pol Pot regime which starved and slaughtered the Khmer people. Along the way he jabs at the international aid community, mocking their frail efforts to mitigate the grim situation on the Thai-Cambodian border with a few tons of rice and some blue plastic tents.

Unfortunately, the book is rife with errors that any junior fact-checker could have caught: Khmer Rouge soldiers speak in Vietnamese, the International Red Cross has its headquarters in Washington, and the protagonist Kim escapes from Cambodia by floating west down the Mongkol Borei River--which in fact flows to the east. Nonetheless, Anderson's description of Khmer Rouge atrocities is accurate, as is his depiction of their crude political philosophy.

All of this is brought to us in clumsy second-rate prose more suited to detective novels and teen-magazine romances. In the Afterword Anderson characterizes Pronzini as "the best writer in America today," suggesting that Anderson's taste in fiction included the Nameless Detective novels such as "Savages" and "Nightcrawlers". Prozini's style seems alien to this particular tale, his characters wooden and the dialogue implausible. If Anderson wanted the public to be moved by the stories of people caught up in one of history's more gruesome tragedies, it was a mistake to couch it in the language of private eyes and mobsters.