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The Devil’s Snare: A Year in Saigon

by Janice Tait

It is Saigon, September 1968, and Janice Tait and her husband Richard, a Canadian diplomat, begin a posting that provides the backdrop for The Devil’s Snare. Tait begins her memoir as a means of recording impressions from her travels through Southeast Asia, while providing a picture of life in the diplomatic service and hoping that time alone with her husband will restore her fragile marriage.

Tait’s tales of her travels in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, North Vietnam, and Japan, both as a tourist and accompanying her husband on official visits, open the reader’s eyes to the landscape, architecture, people, and food of the areas. She was also an eyewitness to the most important political and military conflict in the latter 20th century. Tait describes the view from a helicopter, as other U.S. helicopters destroy a rocket-launch site in the reeds of the Mekong Delta; the effects of Agent Orange on the vegetation; and an orphanage overwhelmed with the offspring of U. S. soldiers and Vietnamese women.

The experience provides Tait with an opportunity, as a politically engaged feminist, to provide insight into the massive social and political challenges in Vietnam, yet she writes superficially about her experiences. Her descriptions of the life of a foreign service wife and the day-to-day details of managing an official residence far from home become repetitive. Tait fails to provide descriptive details and flesh out her personalities, leaving the reader disappointed. And the details of a marriage that ended in 1975, after the period covered in this book, are of interest only to the participants involved.

 

Reviewer: Christopher Johnston

Publisher: McGilligan Books

DETAILS

Price: $22.95

Page Count: 160 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-894692-12-8

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: 2005-10

Categories: Memoir & Biography