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SAVIORS
by Paul Eggers
Harcourt Brace, 350 pp., $23
Paul Eggers' stunning prologue lays out the major players in his provocative, darkly comedic first novel: power and love. Nguyen Van Trinh, the refugee whose name comes to symbolize the boat people's losses, falls victim to what he calls "the Vietnamese sickness," sentimentality, and thus loses his ability to survive. "So beautiful to be a sentimentalist," Trinh reflects. "The old people, they floated on a silver string between the past and the present. They drifted in the air, light as kites, and at night they watched the fires die down and barely stirred when rats squealed in the huts and ran out the sugar-bag doors with mouthfuls of cabbage or skin."
Welcome to the world of Bidong, an island refugee camp off the Malaysian coast where Eggers himself served as a U.N. relief worker in the early 1980s after Peace Corps service in Malaysia from 1976 to 1978. His protagonist, Reuben Gill, has a similar background, with a temperament set to ignite at the first sign of stupidity or self-aggrandizement: qualities he finds abundant in the local U.N. population. Red-haired, giant-framed, blunt, irreverent Reuben is a latter-day Yossarian in reverse-instead of wanting out, he wants in to Bidong, where he conceives that life will be reduced to the bare, satisfying essentials. Such were his memories of his Peace Corps days: "It had all been so simple. He had a lean-to in the jungle. His needs were basic. Once he had worked out a list of the one hundred words he would need to know to fulfill his needs. The rest was gratuitous grunting. The list was something of a revelation: with one hundred words you could eat, sleep, screw, and take the bus."
But life at Bidong is far from simple. Reuben, when he is finally released from mainland office duty, is sent on probation after a diplomatic debacle at a staff cocktail party. There he must contend with the politics and pseudo-hip self-righteousness of the senior relief workers and the threatening presence of a Malay police force representative of a government that barely tolerates the boat people. His unlikely ally is English teacher Bobbi Porkpie Sortini, newly arrived with Reuben and relegated to the most dispiriting schoolshed, where no students ever seem to come. Where the other workers find Reuben dangerously aggressive, they think Porkpie naive. Reuben had once characterized her eyes as "decidedly middle class: doelike and alert, overtly pleasant," but he comes to think of her as "good Green Beret material: quietly ferocious, full of herself, tireless." Porkpie, in fact, is a winning combination of sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and backbone.
Reuben and Porkpie are the only two Anglos on Bidong who seem able to form respectful, fully human relationships with the Asians. There is the reflective Sikh, Gurmit Singh, an administrative head patronizingly perceived as a tenacious paper-pusher by the others, who nonetheless is a man of inspired aspirations and, when he is tested, greatness of heart. Miss Phu, Gurmit's Vietnamese assistant, is both dignified and competent; she touchingly sings out "praise songs to education" each day to draw children to Porkpie's classroom, heroically affirming some standard of continuity and normalcy. Gurmit and Miss Phu (and certainly Porkpie) represent love, in contrast to the power of Malay Task Force Chief Ahmed, who awaits orders to dispatch the boat people if negotiations to maintain the refugee camp fail. It is Reuben, however, a curious amalgam of power and love, who seems best to understand the fear and pain of the Vietnamese, the brutality they have endured, and their need for carthasis and transcendence in an environment offering neither.
Eggers renders this environment in language that is almost paradoxical in its ability to evoke harsh reality with a poetic lyricism: "Late that year the sky turned gray as an ocean, and the rain fell in sheets and made the smell bloom like a plant. There was mud everywhere. Children stood in the middle of the footpaths like their souls wouldn't budge from their bones and cried out for playmates back in Vietnam. The refugees were dreamy and on edge. Husbands smoked clove cigarettes and played Chinese chess with armies fashioned from bottle caps. Wives rolled up the cuffs of their shiny black pants and spent hours teasing the mud from each other's hair with boar-bone combs."
Reading Saviors, one is there on Bidong, smack in the middle of the human comedy, learning to understand that while history is cruel, it also produces its heroes and epiphanies.
Linda Barrett Osborne is a freelance writer and critic in Washington, D.C.
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