Customer Reviews

A Dangerous Friend

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It's a shame that this novel wasn't a finalist for the National Book Award this year. It deserves the honor. A Dangerous Friend is utterly original in its portrait of the early years of American intervention in Vietnam. Ward Just perfectly captures the innocence, avarice, hubris, ignorance, and paranoia of the time. He liberates a genre that is, perhaps, exhausted, and at the very least, well-defined. A war novel without the physical violence (although there's plenty of the emotional kind), A Dangerous Friend captures the fine (sometimes irrelevent) distinctions between military and civilian, colonist and native, hero and villain. Simply, powerfully superb.

A subtle, perfectly nuanced depiction of the early days of the Vietnam war. The tension of combat lingers through the book, but the bombings and firefights are largely kept to the background. What Ward Just creates is an authentic story of the civilians, soldiers and bureaucrats who laid the foundation for a war that would eventually become a catastrophic failure for the United States.

Just does an excellent job of showing the complexity of Vietnam; the bureaucrats vs the military, the new American imperialists vs the old French colonialists, nation-building vs firebombing.

The book centers around Sydney Parade, a sociologist sent to Vietnam to work with a somewhat mysterious government agency, the Llewellyn group, which is charged with collecting information and winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese though community projects. He is tasked with winning the cooperation of a French rubber planter and his American wife, relics of French colonialism who are living "between the lines" in an effort to avoid choosing sides and therefore becoming involved.

"We went to Vietnam because we wanted to." Explains the narrator. "We were not drafted. We were encouraged to volunteer and if our applications were denied, we applied again." Just captures the optimism, confusion, bureacracy, and overconfidence of America's early days in Vietnam, and we soon get a glimpse of the impending disillusionment.

Just covered the Vietnam war as a correspondent, and his first-hand familiarity with the conflict shows. An excellent novel.

"A Dangerous Friend" is the second best novel of its type, but that is high praise indeed, since it is only edged out by Graham Greene's "The Quiet American." Just's prose is a joy to read. He was a first-rate journalist in his younger days, and it shows. His economy with words and syntax is a marvel. Not a word is wasted, not a sentence tortured. Beyond that, the story is gripping and poignant. Just, like Greene before him, re-creates Vietnam on the page in a way that makes it startlingly real. The characters not only fulfill their symbolic function but also engage the reader on a human level. Finally, this is the book that makes you really feel what America did in Vietnam, as the U.S. is clearly the "Dangerous Friend" of the title.

The beauty of this novel is the understated way in which it is told.

I'd been meaning to read this book since it first came out last year and finally sat down with it over the weekend ... and couldn't put it down. In just a spare 256 pages, Ward Just recreates the fallen splendor of colonial Vietnam at the start of the conflict and examines the opposing philosophies of those caught in the gathering maelstrom - the American government presence there to provide "humanitarian" aid and support the rapidly diminishing infrastructure and the expatriate colonials who have lived there for years in relative calm and peace who are unwilling to give up what they call home for the sake of political interventionists who, they believe, have little relevance on their lives.

It's a delicate book but one that gives you pause to think. Ward Just is an verbal wizard at providing descriptions of climate and landscape. His characters are finely drawn and subtle (one might almost say understated) and the plot, while not particularly dramatic in the more traditional sense, evolves in such a way the reader knows something terrible is going to happen because the inevitability is there.

In some ways, this book reminded me of the French film done several years ago, "Indochine", with Catherine Deneuve. While the film is set in the 30's and chronicles the start of the Communist conflict in Vietnam, it portrays a similar crisis of conscience between the old established colonial point of view and the rapidly changing tides of modern history.

One of the exciting things about reading --and I guess this applies to many cultural endeavors, is discovering a new author --as I did when I recently read Ward Just's latest book "Forgetfulness" a book that I enjoyed very much. As a result of that experience I next read "A Dangerous Friend" and was even more impressed with Just's writing style and ability to engage the reader in a most compelling way. This book reminded me somewhat of "The Quiet American" by Graham Greene and several other books (one by a writer named Tyler that had a title like "The Saigon House" and "Rumors of War" by Philip Caputo. In short, I would totally recommend this book and now look forward to reading other earlier books by this author that are available.

Just's book is beautifully written and organized. You know what happens to the principle characters within the initial pages, while the rest of the book is dedicated to telling us why those people we've just met are important. Sydney Parade, with the best of all intentions, inadvertently causes a horrible chain of events, making him the title character, the "dangerous friend." Comparisons must be made to Greene's "The Quiet American," another book which focuses upon the innocence of a single character to illustrate the overall naivete of a nation's efforts. We Americans love to believe that simple optimism, confidence and determination will win the day. As Parade -- and America -- learned, there are several more factors involved.

The characters in this little novel are types more than they are real people: the head of a quasi-governmental assistance agency; an idealistic American who comes to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese; an American who can't handle the freedoms and temptations of being away from home; an expatriate old-timer immersed in the country; and finally, and perhaps adding the most unusual touch, a plantation manager representing the shadowy presence of the French, who had long been in Vietnam, who would remain, and for whom America's war was just a brief disruption to business as usual.

Although all these carry with them their own attitudes and emotional baggage, they are seen too briefly and superficially to evoke emotion in the reader. Rather, the author uses them to give a general idea of the kind of people who propelled this early stage of America's involvement, when civilians were in control and programs were still gathering momentum.

The can-do attitude that America somehow will save Vietnam wears away rapidly from the main protagonist, the idealistic American through whose narration most of the action is seen, and who becomes indeed "a dangerous friend," not only to the French, but also ironically to the Vietnamese as well. His disillusionment is completed when, in a moment of betrayal, his agency, in order to demonstrate America's power to save Vietnam, must wreak destruction on it too.

That a Frenchman would risk certain retribution in such a setting to help an American runs counter to most notions, but author Ward Just, with his experience, must be assumed to know whereof he speaks. This is not a story of the armed conflict most readers associate with Vietnam, but a look at America's early, and even then awkward and misguided, intervention in a complex situation which it little understood and for which it was ill prepared. As such, this work is an interesting footnote to the literature on America's presence in Vietnam.

What a terrific writer Ward Just is. I have read all his books, and this is one of the very best. Even though I have disagreed with him over the years about the rightness of our country's cause in Vietnam, I enjoy his writing. The previous reviews focus on the subject of this book. I'd like to put in a good word for the quality of this book as fiction -- good plot, prose, characters and themes. It is great and if you don't know Mr. Just I hope you will buy this one, read it and enjoy it, and that it will lead you to his other works -- especially The Translator.

read an author who clearly is writing for readers and not with an eye cocked toward Hollywood. At one point before an important meeting among the main characters, Just goes into pages of description of the location of the meeting, the neighborhood, the house, the landscaping. None of it wasted on this reader, all important and contributing to the sense of what would be said in this meeting. Most writers never learned this lesson. I also think this novel has as much to say to us about Vietnam as it does about the mindsets of those charged with winning (or not) the peace in Iraq. We can't change our thinking to adjust for the context.

I thought it interesting to begin the story with an unnamed narrator who simply starts the ball rolling on this story. I find it effective but I haven't figured out why. Ward Just is like a very good restaurant off the beaten track in a place known for tourist attractions. The locals visit often but the tourists never quite seem to find it.

I rate this as one of the better novels I've read. It presents an interesting look at civilian/government involvement in Vietnam. Tension, intrigue, good and bad guys and lessons to be learned can all be found in this book.

A well constructed story presented by a gifted author elevates this book to literature class. Just has an elegant, simple way of writing that I found quite appealing. If you have any interest in the range of America's involvement in Vietnam or simply would enjoy a well written book and a good story, I'd recommend you give this book a look.