The Good American

A FOREST OF TIGERS (373 pp.)--Robert Shaplen--Knopf ($3.95).

It is a lot easier to be a political novelist than Secretary of State. Robert Shaplen, onetime correspondent in the Far East, demonstrates in A Forest of Tigers that the novelist holds cards the diplomat could never hope to draw. The proving ground is Indo-China around 1950, when the Communists had fully shown their hand but had not yet begun their big push. How was the U.S. to handle its difficult French allies, faction-ridden Viet Nam, the everlasting intrigue, the demagogic appeal of the Reds?

Similar questions have been asked in a handful of books about Southeast Asia, notably Norman Lewis' A Single Pilgrim (TIME, April 26, 1954). Author Shaplen manages to suggest that the answers are easy without really giving any answer. Faced with immensely complex problems, Hero Adam Patch wades in with the zeal and vocabulary of a New Republic editorial. The U.S. consul in Saigon, he chafes under what he thinks is stifling official caution. If only his stuffy superiors would let him get to the little people of the villages, let him bypass the complacent French, and let the Vietnamese see how decent and generous the Americans really are!

Novelist Shaplen's setting is authentic. His Saigon is hot, and more oppressive than the heat is the sense of deceit, mistrust and danger. Communist terrorists hurl grenades into cafes in broad daylight. Harmless-looking old shopkeepers convert their shabby little stores into arms depots for Communist agents. A Chinese gambling-house operator runs weapons to the enemy. Counterespionage is apt at any time to burgeon into counter-counterespionage. At this game Adam Patch is about as subtle as a sand-lot quarterback. A Vietnamese doctor shows up, claiming to be a deserter from the Communists, with a plan for winning the countryside that the Reds have not yet seized. Although nothing reliable is known about him, Adam latches onto him as if he were the answer to a State Department prayer. Result: when the doctor is murdered, presumably by the Communists, he is made to appear like a political sacrifice to U.S. stupidity and hypocrisy.

Adam is about as adroit emotionally as he is politically. A long-legged secretary is unaccountably mad about him, but he takes to her with the ardor of a man on a diet taking yoghurt. The Eurasian girl he takes to bed turns out to be as mixed up in her political senses as she is in her veins: working as an agent for both the French and the Communists, she is eventually caught and doomed. At novel's end Adam Patch is recalled to Washington, the victim of what Author Shaplen plainly indicts as U.S. failure to pursue its democratic ideals.

The book is fair enough at spelling out the problem. The French were indeed too intractable, too addicted to colonialism. The Communists were indeed calling the turns, and U.S. help was probably too little and too late. Above all, there is the real problem of how to convince the world that America stands for freedom. But it is frightening to think of this mission in the hands of men like Author Shaplen's hero. For Adam Patch is just a fugitive from the WPA era transplanted to Indo-China; any halfway smart Communist agent could sell him the Hanoi bridge.

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