A lovely country

the long version

Between the invasions of Cambodia in 1970 and Laos in 1971, the United States sought to pacify Vietnam. But, as David Lawton's powerful novel shows, some of the hearts and minds conquered were American. Giles Trent, an intelligence adviser, fights the war in many ways: by lying in ambush with a team of South Vietnamese killers, but also by handing over a briefcase of money as a political bribe to a Saigon general. Addicted to the nervous energy of the war and to the ravaged beauty of the country and its people, Giles relishes his equivocal role and Vietnam brutalities. But Emily Macdonnell, a news correspondent, intellectual and ambitious, newly arrived in Saigon, challenges the evasions offered by Giles and his ambassador to hide the American mission's rigging of a South Vietnamese election. After Emily is detained and strip-searched at Tan Son Nhut airport, she and Giles become co-conspirators in a war within a war. A Lovely Country captures the decadence of Saigon before its fall: double agents, scheming mistresses, and murderous politicians; cynical correspondents eager for corpses to film; diplomats and spies lawless under the cloak of secrecy. A child is killed in a village by American soldiers; a crowded Saigon nightclub is ripped open by a terrorist's bomb; and Giles and Emily commit separate acts of betrayal.