01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, July 23, 2006

BY SAM COALE
Special to The Journal

DAY OF THE DEAD, by Marshall Brement. Moyer Bell. 440 pages. $26.95.

This fascinating but plodding novel, with an insider's view of the workings of the American Embassy in Saigon, 1962-63, including the coup that overthrew the Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem, reads like a bureaucrat's memoir.

Marshall Brement, an American diplomat and former Newporter who served in Vietnam and became ambassador to Iceland, knows his way around the diplomatic track. But all too quickly procedure and protocol replace plot in an efficient if drab prose style that includes cables, cabals, lists, charts and military options, with too many lectures and speeches substituting for dialogue and drama.

The tale itself is often riveting, complete with the Ngo Dinh brothers: the leader, the Machiavellian adviser, the Catholic archbishop and the warlord. David Marnin is our hero who organizes the ambassadorial reading and rises in the ranks amid the developing crises in Vietnam.

The outspoken Madame Nhu; the passionately cynical reporter for The New York Times, Wilis Mandelbrot; the "pyro-suicides" of Buddhist monks; the on-again, off-again coup plans of generals supported by the United States (who kill Diem and prove to be worse than he); Marnin's affair with the all knowing, sensuous widow, Lily Do Ba Xang -- all pass before us with some modicum of personal traits. But most of the characters occupy their government roles only and are so interchangeable that you can't keep track of them.

This is more manual than novel, however interesting and meticulous, an insider's view so incarcerated within the embassy that the outside world remains sketchy and under-developed. Information replaces insight. Tennis games often seem more important than the war with, perhaps, a touch of irony but not enough. Positions overwhelm personality in this "horizontal" tale confined all too earnestly "to making sure that established procedures functioned efficiently."

We get the trees but not the forest.

At the end when Marnin examines the metaphorical blood on his hands, he wonders if he were a coward or "only a nascent bureaucrat . . . . Or was he one of life's observers?" I can't tell the difference among any of these perspectives, not because of some all-too-human complexities and ambiguities but because they're all equally bland and unexamined.

And yet there is an almost epic sweep to this deliberate diplomatic dance. You learn a lot generally about Vietnam and about America's blind spots, then as now. One character comments, "Your countrymen seem to have the absurd idea that your political system . . . can be transplanted across oceans."

Sound familiar?

Sam Coale teaches at Wheaton.