From Publishers Weekly
The protagonist of Eickhoff's latest novel, an ambitious combination western and war story, is a guilt-ridden, melancholy veteran named Henry Morgan, one of the few survivors of an elite team dropped into the jungles of Vietnam to coordinate hit-and-run raids by montagnard tribesmen on Vietcong troops. Eickhoff explicitly likens Morgan to Odysseus, combining both of Homer's epics to encompass Morgan's time in Vietnam and his troublesome return to a country he no longer understands. From a Kentucky monastery, Morgan recounts his past: beginning four years after his insertion among the mountain tribesmen, he describes the death of his brother, Billy, during an attack after a villager defects to Hanoi. Morgan's CO, a scheming colonel named Black (possibly Agamemnon), manipulates Morgan into using the montagnards as expendable troops, a duty that eventually destroys Morgan's peace of mind. The narrative is punctuated at intervals by the voice of Dog (Tiresias), an old Sioux hand on the Morgan family ranch in the fictional Plains town of Ithaca who plays the role of chorus in Morgan's sad story. Eickhoff (Fallon's Wake) is straightforward about his adaptation of the Greek epic to fit his semi-autobiographical tale (he was one of three survivors of a unit of 27 integrated with the montagnard tribesmen in the Vietnam highlands). While he draws some interesting parallels between North American (including Lakota Sioux) and Southeast Asian tribal worldviews, the wartime element takes up far more room than the journey home, making for a somewhat contrived thematic relationship. Both the landscape and the emotional atmosphere of Vietnam are powerfully portrayed, however, and one must admire Eickhoff's imaginative attempt to compare the haunting fate of Vietnam veterans, returned from brutal combat to a society that largely scorned them, to a classic narrative of a dislocated life.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
This strange tale, told by the author of
Fallon's Wake (2000), begins in the present on a ranch in the Dakotas, then ventures back to the past, when Henry Morgan is the commander of a band of American and Montagnard troops in Vietnam (the latter are the mountain people who often fought alongside the Americans). Morgan must help a village chief pursue his own son, who has gone over to the Vietcong. During that time, he will watch his own brother, who followed him to Vietnam, die. Morgan seems part Rambo and part die-hard warrior; but wartime heroics don't translate to a welcome home back in the States. His first encounters stateside leave him feeling alone and abandoned by a country that has changed. Rather than return to the ranch and help his father, Morgan enters a monastery, where his nephew finds him and confronts him with the news that he is needed back at the family ranch. He has choices to make and a past to reconcile with his present.
Marlene ChamberlainCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
