Review: Anam by André Dao

When is this novel set? You may find it harder than you think to locate its temporal centre. Perhaps because it has many. Perhaps because it doesn’t have one, its many times not circling one era but each arranged in such a way that none takes precedence over the others. Certainly, Andre Dao makes use of plenty of tenses. We could start with the future perfect (“I will have”) that is the tense of the second chapter, and is an equally good description of the desire of the unnamed narrator. Or the simple present of the narrative proper, which finds the narrator in Oxford, walking a riverside path with his wife and baby daughter, considering the thesis he is to write.

He is the son of Vietnamese refugees, a working lawyer living in Melbourne whose most recent task has been building cases for refugees caught in Australia’s barbaric detention regime. His recently passed grandfather, also a lawyer, was imprisoned for ten years by the Communist government. The narrator’s mind travels first to the outskirts of Paris where his four grandparents live, then to colonial Vietnam and his grandparents’ youth. While his grandfather was alive, he conducted interviews for a book that he has tried and failed to complete over many years (until, perhaps, now). Strata by strata, André Dao builds a picture of his grandparents’ lives in a quest to know them and, in turn, himself. In its measured pace and soulful prose, it has a little of Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North, and similarly interrogates a conflict whose history is dominated by one story in the West.

But it is never that simple, this memory quest. Memory is fallible. Memory is fraught. Memory is political. “Which war were we in?” our narrator writes, “B-52s had dropped bombs over northern Vietnam for most of my grandfather’s life”. His grandfather, in fact, first joined the Communists in their anti-colonial battle before switching sides to become a political enemy after the wars. The West has made the Vietnam War mean a particular thing; in Anam Dao writes against this narrative. He writes back in atrocities conveniently or even deliberately forgotten, such as the famine that killed likely a million people in northern Vietnam in 1944 under Japanese occupation, far more than the war itself. The narrator’s grandfather tells of frangipanis masking the smell of the bodies that he collected to be taken to mass graves. “The scent had a veiling effect”, the narrator writes, but then laments his own unwillingness to descend to the bathic depths of atrocity, “the only one warding off stenches and covering up sores here is me”.

Anam is enervated by the idea of history as speculative fiction. When a detainee on Manus Island sends him recordings of life on the island, the narrator describes them as portals, “portals that opened up wherever I happened to be when a new message arrived — at the supermarket, in the library, at home in our lounge room”. Time slips through the novel, so even though the narrator’s grandfather is dead in the present, he seems to be alive. The title itself refers to a fictional country, loosely derived from one of Vietnam’s earlier names and the Catholic memory rite of anamnesis. “A curious topography, bending as it does towards memory,” Anam is inhabited by people the narrator calls Anamites, people who have “memories of a future home”. Dao doggedly interrogates these responsibilities to the past over the course of this novel; Anam is a conversation with history and its record-keepers. He cites thinkers and writers from the centre and from the margins, including Alexis Wright, “writing in a way that makes all times equally important”, an ambition Anam succeeds in. He mocks the novel industrial complex, imagining a Great Novel that is received as “a lyrical meditation on loss, guilt and the possibility of redemption” that “has succeeded in truly humanising the Vietnamese”.

Over its course, Anam takes on a geological power, inferring meaning from the layers of history much as a palaeontologist might. Dao offers many metaphors for the past, but perhaps the most astonishing is that of a sinking house in Ha Noi built on land reclaimed from a swamp:

you can look out at the swamp from under the eaves of the house, at the rising surface that gets closer the longer you stay, which you do — stay — because where else could you go now that the mud, mixed in with the remains of the dead whose names adorn the heavy brick wall, has cut off all exits, so that your choices are to stay and watch or jump and drown, which is to say that this is what I can hand over to you — a borrowed view, due to be returned any second now, as soon as the house finally collapses under the weight of the monument constructed within it.

All is returned to mud eventually, but Dao makes the most of his borrowed time.

Gay rating: not gay.