Review: A little ungainly at times, but the heart and emotion it packs make up for the weaknesses
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 6, 2014
It seems, from my limited exposure to the self-publishing market, that much of it is filled with genre works of one kind or another - sci-fi, romance, urban fantasy, and so forth. It's rarer to find something like The Collection of Heng Souk, a novel about people who have been marked and shaped by the Vietnam War and their involvement with it. There are no thriller elements, no grim secrets from the past that change everything you think you know about the world; just a man who wants to know the fate of his father, an old Vietnamese man dying of cancer, and a young woman who's been sent to deliver something to her uncle. How they call connect and what it has to do with a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp is the plot of The Collection of Heng Souk, but ultimately, it's less about how these people are connected and more about how their connections shaped their lives and their minds. How does a man live with his conscience after a lifetime of interrogation, torture, and murder? How does a woman deal with revelations about her family and the realization that life isn't as cut and dried as she assumed? More importantly, how do forgiveness, justice, mercy, and even religion fit into such a dark and violent place? From a technical perspective, The Collection of Heng Souk has some issues; there are run-on sentences a plenty, and the dialogue is often a bit clunky and unwieldy. But the emotional beats at the core of the tale are strong ones, and first-time author Wilsher does a superb job of anchoring his tale not in the horrors it depicts unflinchingly, but in the hearts and souls of its characters, making the stakes clear from the outset. It's a nicely human book, and one that taps into issues we face not only with soldiers and those who have done brutal things during their service to the county, but with many other aspect of our lives, including how we relate to family and to our own pasts and collective experiences. The Collection of Heng Souk is sometimes awkward, sometimes ungainly, and sometimes a little on-the-nose. But it's also effective and honest, and it has some heartfelt power that offsets those weaknesses and gives the book its strength.