‘Forward O Peasant!’ by Maclean J. Storer – Vietnam’s most humorous novel

Have you ever been to Vietnam? I haven’t, but reading Maclean J. Storer’s book, Forward O Peasant! (And Total Victory Shall Be Ours!), felt exactly like being there. In case you’ve already been to Vietnam, this book will make you smile at the good and grimace at the bad memories you may have experienced while being in one of the few communist countries left in the world. If you’re still living in Vietnam, then maybe you’ll recognize yourself as one of the many expatriates roaming the bars of Saigon, trying to make sense of the Vietnamese way of dealing with things.

Bangkok-based Maclean J. Storer, a British-born Australian author, lived in Vietnam for many years, so he knows what he writes about. After a long and successful journalistic career, Storer makes his fiction debut with Forward O Peasant!, published in 2008 by Gauss Publishing from Singapore.

I am proud to say that I have personally met and socialized with the author through the Bangkok Writers Guild, an informal writer’s group that meets once a month to talk about writing, books and life in general. It was during our first meeting in 2009 that he gave me his book. Once I opened it, I couldn’t put it down. Except when I was laughing out loud!

The first thing that strikes the readers when they pick up Storer’s Forward O Peasant! is not necessarily the large format and the exceptional number of pages, nor the excellent quality of the paper used, but the front cover illustration, artfully illustrated by Julie McEnerny. It depicts two model workers of the communist regime looking up at the gleaming symbol of Vietnam’s communist might: the red hammer and sickle proudly displayed on top of a modern building. Stairs that are made of gold and are flanked by trees with bushy canopies lead to a communist dream of serenity. The two workers, in their blue factory uniform, smile and stare in awe at the beauty and grandeur of their government’s achievements.

But this theatrical image is only a façade of what the real world actually looks like. Behind the beautiful line of perfect trees, below the buildings of the mighty communist party, lies an amalgam of confusion, deceit, violence, corruption, and hardships. As you reach the point closer to where the two workers are standing, the scenery becomes more and more bleak.

Shabby dwellings, dirt and rubbish make up the immediate surroundings. The place where the real people live and the life the real people have to handle on a daily basis is in stark contrast to the stairs of gold imagery. It’s a fierce world, a dog-eat-dog world (don’t forget about the Vietnamese culinary specialties…) where the strong crushes the weak, where cheating, lying and extortion are part of a daily routine regulated by the strict supervision of the Big Brother, who’s always watching.

Forward O Peasant! is a highly witty, humorous, and politically incorrect story that follows the misfortunes and misadventures of Phillip Jonathan Snow, a young Englishman employed by the Globality Institute. It is an organization loosely connected to the United Nations. Snow is sent to Vietnam to investigate the disappearance of the former U.N. representative in charge of overseeing the proper distribution of aid money.

Reluctant and totally unprepared, Snow finds himself in a country and culture he knows nothing about, “except that it was lightly carpeted with a chemical called Agent Orange.” From his very first few minutes in Saigon and until his fatidic departure, Snow is surrounded by shocking displays from suicidal taxi drivers and ignorant government officials to a psychotic populace.

The target of a greedy and corrupt system, Snow is faced with the task of saving endangered primates and redirecting aid money to efforts in eradicating the bird flu. But, Colonel Nguyen Van Hanh (aka “Deputy Minister of Health, Regional President of the Fatherland Front, Hero American Killer, Leader of the Southern Struggle Committee To Eradicate Bird Flu”), is methodically looking after his own interests (which do not coincide at all with the communist nation’s struggle to develop), and is dedicated to making Snow’s life in Vietnam as miserable as possible.

How Snow succeeds in making sense of things in a country where everyone and everything seems to work against him, I will let the readers find out by themselves. Will Snow be able to keep his job, sanity and personal values intact or will he cave in to the hostile Marxist ideologues, drunken expats, inefficient bureaucrats, hypervigilant beggars, and lunatic waitresses? It rests with you to find out.

Forward O Peasant! (And Total Victory Shall Be Ours!) by Maclean J. Storer is a captivating and well-written novel that I highly recommend to anyone interested in what life in contemporary Vietnam can be like through the eyes of an edgy writer. Approach this book with an open mind and total victory shall be yours!