The Angel of Darkness (review)

Set in contemporary 'Vietnam, Butler's artful new novel focuses on the love affair between Benjamin Cole, a middle-aged American, and Le Thi Tien, a young Vietnamese woman . In 1966, Ben was in Saigon driving trucks for the United StatesArmy. The story takes place almost thirty years later, when Ben returns to Ho Chi Minh City and meets Tien, who finds herself trapped between traditional Vietnamese beliefs and the policies of the new Communist state. In works such as his Pulitzer Prizewinning story collection, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, and his more recent collection, Tabloid Dreams, Butler has established himself as a veritable ventriloquist, a master of the first-person voice. Here he alternates between the sensuous, lyrical voices of Ben and Tien to explore the conflicts between old and new Vietnam as the couple struggle to find their place between the past and the future. For Ben, a steel worker from the Midwest, 'Vietnam has a violent past; yet he feels more at home in this strange country, in Tien's tiny apartment , than he does with his family and his routine life in America. Tien lives in Saigon, working for the government as a guide for foreign tourists. Outwardly she follows Communist Party lines, dressing and behaving conservatively, but she longs for intimacy and passion, for sexual and emotional fulfillment. Both Ben and Tien are searching for a home in a culture in which ancestral legends clash with government propaganda . Tien's mother, a prostitute, fled Vietnam when the Communists took control, leaving the young Tien to live with her grandmother Tien believes her father is dead, although she often senses that his spirit is present. Some of the most evocative imagery in the book is contained in Tien's descriptions of traditional Vietnamese religion, folklore, and mythology. Butler's sensitivity to Vietnamese conflicts and culture earned him the Pulitzer Prize for A Good Scentfrom a Strange Mountain. In The Deep Green Sea, he returns to that country to illuminate the long-term impact on individuals of its war. (JB) The Angel ofDarkness by Caleb Carr Random House, 1997, 626 pp., $25.95 Like his first novel, The Alienist, Carr's second work of fiction is set in an ominous New York City of the late nineteenth century. It has been a year since the renowned alienist, Dr. Laszlo Kreisler, and his cohorts captured the brutal serial killer John Beecham. This time the team of sleuths is pursuing Elspeth Hunter, a malicious nurse suspected of kidnapping the infant daughter of a Spanish diplomat. They discover that Hunter is actually Libby Hatch, suspected in the killings of many infants, including her own. In their quest to find the missing child, the group is led to the courtroom, where the sanctity of motherhood, argued by the famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow, is pitted against Dr. Kreisler's desire to protect the children of New York. Narrated by the youngest member of the investigative team, Stevie Taggert, The Angel of Darkness is far less gruesome than The Alienist. Carr The Missouri Review · 209 once again flexes his researching muscles, providing a heavy dose of New York's social history. But while Stevie's young voice is an energetic change from The Alienist's narrator, John Schuyler Moore, Carr sometimes uses it as an excuse to condescend to his readers, as if he doubted they could grasp his less than subtle hints. The book also suffers from tired characters, with the exception of Stevie, about whom we learn nothing more than we did in The Alienist. The plot is sometimes farfetched, and the appearance of an aboriginal pygmy with tiny bow and poisoned arrows is simply ridiculous. The cameos by famous figures (Clarence Darrow, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Theodore Roosevelt,among others) add nothing. Finally, the group's willingness to drop their efforts to save the baby (even though they know exactly where she is) so that they can instead research Libby Hatch's his-tory is difficult to swallow. This elite team seems to have no qualms about abandoning their original project and leaving the baby in the care of a murderess. At 626 pages, TheAngel ofDark-ness...