The Real Dragon: A Novel of Vietnam - Softcover

Trigg, Louisa Hagner

9781564743527: The Real Dragon: A Novel of Vietnam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1564743527 ISBN 13: 9781564743527

Publisher: Daniel & Daniel Publishers, 2015

Set on the eve of the Vietnam War, The Real Dragon is a fast-paced novel of love and romance, politics and danger. The story moves from steamy backstreet Saigon neighborhoods to the tennis courts and dinner parties of foreign society, and climaxes in a high-country jungle. There East meets West in a cremony that turns violent, testing the courage and honor of all concerned.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From the Publisher:

HISTORY MEETS ROMANTIC ADVENTURE IN LOUISA TRIGG’S NOVEL OF PRE-WAR VIETNAM “Told from the perspective of a number of characters--Vietnamese, American, and British--it will provide illuminating reading for students of this infamous era.... Trigg offers well-researched insights into the struggle between North and South Vietnam and the role that U.S. and British politics played in the war.” --Booklist, American Library Association (2/1/01) South Vietnam in the early 1960s was a land of fragile peace. People from several different societies coexisted in Saigon: French people, Americans, people from various Asian countries, and native Vietnamese--all with complex, conflicting political philosophies. When an attempted coup against President Ngo Dinh Diem sent shock waves from Saigon to Washington, it became clear that the tranquility of South Vietnam was at risk. As attention was focused on this beautiful but troubled land, the rest of the world became aware of what the people living in Saigon already knew: that the Diem regime was corrupt and unpopular, and that the Viet Cong were actively disrupting the peace, doing their best to prevent reform and to preserve the decay of government in the South. Americans take the center stage of this powerful novel. They include Allison Giraud, the widow of a French planter murdered by the Viet Minh; Joe Ruffin, an intensely involved doctor-missionary; Mark Gardiner, an ambitious Foreign Service officer in the U.S. Embassy; and Katherine Gregory, the bored wife of a USAID official. These players pair off in various combinations, looking for love as if it might be their last chance before the world changes for the worse. Meanwhile, a quarrelsome and passionate trio of Viet Cong revolutionaries plot the assassination of the Vietnamese Province Chief in Dalat, the town where the American Ambassador has his country villa. East meets West in a ceremony that turns violent, testing the courage, honor, and love of all concerned.

The Real Dragon is a fast-paced novel of love, politics, and danger, with spiritual overtones. The story moves all over Saigon, from steamy back-street neighborhoods to the tennis courts and verandahs of foreign society; it also travels to the ruins of Angkor Wat and reaches its climax in a jungle where Americans and Europeans are seldom seen and less than welcome.

From the Inside Flap:

Vietnam on the eve of war... Saigon, April 1961. The people of Vietnam are waiting for the monsoon. In the aftermath of a coup against President Ngo Dinh Diem, the turbulence of this story of love and adventure is created not by the coming rains, but by the complex interplay of many opposing forces hoping to shape the future of Vietnam.

Not just a novel of history, The Real Dragon is a story of people, brave and flawed, from the Vietnamese barber/would-be revolutionary to the Ivy-League embassy aide, from the American military “advisers” to the tough Viet Cong cadres, from the tribal Christian pastor to the street urchin and the Vietnamese Province Chief.

At the center of the action are Allison Giraud, the American widow of a French planter murdered by the Viet Minh, and Joe Ruffin, an American doctor-missionary. They discover each other--and love--at a dangerous moment in history, as the world they knew is beginning to change all around them.

The Real Dragon presents the forces of history without bias or propaganda. Against its luscious tropical background, the novel teems with tension, passion, death, humor, and the mystical power of the human spirit. Written with love and compassion, this is a story of that special land, Vietnam, not only waiting for the monsoon, but on the eve of war. From the back cover: “Louisa Trigg has created characters as complex as Vietnam itself on the eve of the American war. Their intense personal challenges and tragedies pull the reader into a place and time that to her and to her characters was unforgettable, and she skillfully portrays and probes the depths of their emotional dilemmas and moral choices. It is a weave of lives brighter and more varied than Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, but, like Greene, Trigg preserves in the details an awareness of the conflicted whole.

“Although Trigg’s Vietnam of 1961 is no Garden of Eden, it is a real place with real people, and she has made it as fascinating for us as it was for her.” --Brantly Womack, Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs, University of Virginia

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.