Book review: The Sympathizer comes unscrewed in brilliant sequel

"I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces." So went the memorable first line of Vietnam-born American author Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer (2015, available here).

Its unnamed narrator fled war-torn Vietnam for America, then was brutally tortured in a Communist re-education camp upon its return. It ended with him adrift at sea, a refugee once more.

Its much-anticipated sequel, The Committed, picks up with him arriving in 1980s France - the homeland of his father, a Catholic priest who refused to acknowledge him.

He moves in with his "aunt" - really a former espionage contact, now a sophisticated editor - and rises through the Parisian underworld as a drug dealer, all the while trying not to let his beloved and homicidal blood brother Bon find out that he was a Communist spy.

The narrator has always been a man of two minds, which made him such an effective double agent. But his years of duplicity, culminating in his re-education, have stripped the threads of the screw holding his halves together, and his identity is coming apart.

"Now I was no longer screwed - humanity's universal condition - but was instead unscrewed," he quips.

The Committed is a scabrously brilliant work. It is relentlessly hilarious about the bleakest matters, such as anti-Asian prejudice - dismally timely given the recent spike in violence against Asians in the United States - and the dark history of French imperialism.

"I sat on a corner of the couch in the state of humiliation, a region I have visited quite often," says the narrator, who spends much of his time as an Orientalised Other in a miasma of self-deprecating rage.

In a virtuosic section comprised mostly of a single run-on sentence, he is assaulted by rival Arab drug dealers. Despite appealing to post-colonial ideology - "My Algerian brothers, have you never read Ho Chi Minh's case against French colonisation?" - he is beaten nearly to death, then dishes out the same to his assailants.

"The finishing school of re-education," he reflects, "not having killed me, had made me as unkillable as a cliche."

Like its predecessor, The Committed is a novel of ideas. Its author is wedded to philosophising at every available juncture - even the bodyguard at a brothel reads Frantz Fanon's The Wretched Of The Earth (1961).

All this theory would be hard to swallow, except Nguyen is such an incredibly funny writer that one can let his verbosity slide. He can pull off an academic dissertation with the air of a caper.

He has said he is working on the last book in the trilogy, in which the narrator will finally return to America. What could a third act look like for a man with two faces? One can hardly wait.

If you like this, read: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (Vintage, 2019, $18.95, available here), a novel written as a letter from the Vietnamese-American narrator, Little Dog, to his illiterate mother.