Liars and Saints
by Maile Meloy
John Murray, £14.99, pp. 260, ISBN 0719566444
Darien Dogs
by Henry Shukman
Jonathan Cape, £12.99, pp. 279, ISBN 022407282
‘Short’ as Peter Dimock’s potent novel about the Vietnam war may be, it packs a not insignificant punch. The curious title is to be taken literally: this really is a ‘rhetoric’, in the classical sense, and the point on which it wishes to persuade is indeed ‘leaving the family’.
For, on the eve of the first Gulf war, Jarleth Lanham writes a letter to his two adoptive ‘sons’, intended to be read when they come of age in 11 years’ time (which takes us unwittingly to September 2001, just to hot up the political spice). Pledging them nearly a million dollars, Jarleth’s ‘purpose’, as he writes, ‘is solely to provide you with the means of leaving the family entirely, should you desire to do so — to provide you, in other words, with some speech for another history’.
This last point is key, revealing both Jarleth and Dimock’s understanding of the problematic and symbiotic relationship between history and speech; the fact that language all too often shapes history, not the other way round. As Jarleth’s letter becomes a profound indictment of the conduct and verbiage of the Vietnam administration (which included his brother AG, and their father, who as a special adviser to the President was one of the chief architects of the war), then, it also turns in on itself by its own rhetorical mechanics.
Peter Dimock, the former Random House editor who was a conscientious objector during Vietnam, and who followed a Harvard degree in history and literature with a Yale postgraduate degree in literary and historical narrative, has waited a while to produce his first novel; he is 54.
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