A mystery explores the darkness of French-ruled Vietnam

Jacquie Pham’s debut novel, “Those Opulent Days,� begins where many thrillers these days begin: with the site of a death, assumed to be a murder. Readers don’t know, at first, who died — it’s revealed midway through the book — or who killed him, but both victim and killer can be only one of three very wealthy young men: Phong, Minh and Edmond. These three and Duy — whose point of view the book opens with, signaling that he’s clearly alive and presumably innocent — have been friends since childhood, and their lives, though deeply privileged, have grown only darker since those relatively rosy, innocent days in boarding school where the quartet formed.

(Atlantic Monthly)

The novel is set in 1928 Vietnam, which was then under colonial French rule, and the men live in Saigon, which was in a section of French Indochina named Annam by the colonizers. Duy, Phong and Minh are all Annamites — with Duy having Chinese ancestry through his mother — while Edmond is the son of the wealthy “Monsieur Leon Moutet, the smart and capable diplomat who saw Annam for what it really was: a fertile land with riches he could easily exploit.� Edmond’s whiteness and Frenchness are key to the friend group’s dynamic; ever since they were young, Duy, Phong and Minh had been aware that it was politically expedient to let Edmond do and have whatever he wanted.

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In the book’s prologue, readers are introduced to these characters and to a pivotal night in their youth, although only Duy recognizes it as such. When they were 11, they sneaked out of their dorms to visit a locally famous fortune teller. Master Cần is a suitably spooky and wizened old lady who shares a prophecy with the boys: One of them will go mad, one will pay, one will agonize and one will die. The boys scoff; fortune-telling isn’t real. Yet for the next 11 years, Duy dreams of the prophecy and fears it.

Pham then jumps between the night of the death and the six — then five, then four and so on — days before it, slowly revealing the events leading up to the fateful night. It’s a well-executed structure meant to build suspense, and it does, although the secrecy surrounding who died feels like an unnecessary question mark during the first half of the book that leads to some awkward phrasing.

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The novel focuses on different characters in turn, zeroing in on their points of view, and although some of the language is overwrought, Pham excels at crafting the despicable nature of the elites: Minh, heir to a rubber empire; his mother, obsessed with maintaining the family’s status after her husband’s death; Duy, heir to an opium business; Phong, son of a wealthy scholar; and Edmond, the French diplomat’s son. Their various interactions with their servants are telling, ranging from indifference to condescension to outright violence. Duy, for instance, reflexively thanks them and knows that they “adored it, the way Duy pretended they had a choice.� These elites are all fabulously wealthy, and live like it. Alcohol and opium flow freely, money is no object (one scene exemplifies this by having Duy and a rival of his literally burning cash to see who can boil a pot faster with this expensive fuel), and the servants, not to mention the poor and starving children in the streets or the overworked and underfed workers in the fields and forests, barely register to this upper crust of Annamite and French society.

While some of their antics are a bit cartoonishly evil — there are two characters who enjoy picturing or causing animal suffering, for instance — the rot pervading them all runs deep and is clearly tied to colonialism and the ways in which its grip brings out the worst in both its perpetrators and those colonized who are privileged enough to hang onto conditional power.

Pham also compellingly explores the lives and inner workings of two servants in Minh’s household as well as a lowly French bureaucrat and a Frenchwoman who serves as a surrogate mother of sorts to Edmond even as she enables his father’s sadism. The servant nicknamed Tattler for much of the book — her real name is Sen — is especially wonderful, a fiery and determined woman steeped in both resentment and ambition who was sold into servitude by a mother with no other options.

On the other end of the spectrum is Hai, Minh’s personal maid. He’s fallen in love with her and she with him, although she never quite stops being afraid of her once-master, now-lover — and for good reason, as he’s short tempered and violent with everyone but her and his three friends. Hai spends most of the book believing in her own lowliness, clearly having internalized the messages she’s received as a poor Annamite serving the rich Annamites who, in turn, must serve the richer, more powerful French colonizers. When gifted an ao dai — a traditional Vietnamese garment — by Minh’s mother, she thinks of it as “a symbolic creation she hadn’t the mind to understand.�

“Those Opulent Days� is subtitled “a mystery,� which is odd as the one at the book’s center is useful for driving its plot forward but doesn’t really feel like the point. Instead, the novel’s main interest seems to be its character studies and historical setting. 1920s Vietnam is lushly and lovingly described, and its characters vividly realized. Rather than being a mystery, the novel has far more in common with noir: It examines the dark griminess that is part and parcel of the spectrum of humanity.

Ilana Masad is a books and culture critic and author of “All My Mother’s Lovers.�