Former Hongkonger Jonathan Chamberlain tells Matt Fleming how a trip to Vietnam inspired him to write his new novel.

It may be almost 40 years since the end of the Vietnam War but memories of the gruesome conflict still live in the hearts and minds of countless people across the world – particularly those in and around the Asian country and in the USA. And the horrors also live on in the warped mind of Wash, the dark figure in Jonathan Chamberlain’s new novel, The Alphabet of Vietnam.

Chamberlain, who lived and wrote in Hong Kong for 25 years until 2000 but still returns occasionally from the UK, weaves an intricate plot in Alphabet, which captures the tense atmosphere of Vietnam, back in wartime days and now. It centres around Jack, whose brother Joe – a ‘Nam veteran – has died, and features Joe’s war buddy, Wash, who has kidnapped a girl. With its effective staccato-legato rhythm, it builds tension from the off. But the inspiration didn’t come from memories of war, says Chamberlain.

He explains: “The seeds of The Alphabet of Vietnam were first sown in 1978 when I saw The Deer Hunter at the old President Cinema in Causeway Bay. The war had not long been over and it was the first Hollywood attempt to deal with Vietnam. I was appalled at its casual racism, the hatred in it towards Vietnamese people and the refusal to see that there was a Vietnamese dimension at all. I was furious.”

Chamberlain immediately started reading up on the war and a few years later he made a short trip to Vietnam. He says, when there, he found references to the feminist poet Ho Xuan Hu’ong and was also given an edition of her poems in Vietnamese. The sections of the novel dealing with the time spent translating her poems ‘is all pretty much as it happened to me, slightly fictionalised to be more American’.

“So that was one of my sources of inspiration,” says Chamberlain. “The second was that I was reading a lot of horrific stories – oral narratives – of GIs and I wanted to condense that, and so I wrote the notebook entries for the character of Joe. But at around the same time as this stream of ideas was developing there was a case of two serial killers – Leonard Lake and former Hongkonger Charles Ng – who pretty much acted like my characters Joe and Wash acted.”

The novel was put on hold when Chamberlain’s daughter was born with Down Syndrome. He set up the Hong Kong Down Syndrome Association (a story he details in his book Wordjazz for Stevie) and then, sadly, his wife Bernadette was diagnosed with cervical cancer. She died in 1995. (Chamberlain’s book Cancer: The Complete Recovery Guide was written in her honour).

“So Alphabet came and went from the forefront of my thoughts,” recalls Chamberlain. ”And it grew and spread. I tried organising the material one way, then another, got frustrated and put it away. Then, two years ago, one morning, I woke up and thought of the problem when the words ‘chop everything in half’ arose from the murkiness of the unconscious. I saw immediately how that might work and, five weeks later, after the most brutal surgery, I had my novel.”

Chamberlain says that one of the things he enjoyed about writing the book was developing the ability to be involved expansively with his characters. He says: “When I started out writing this book I could not have written the character Jack as I just did not have the life experience. Similarly, by the time I did have that experience I could not have written the character Joe as I just did not then have the aggressive energy required. So the book has benefitted from the long gestation.” The Alphabet of Vietnam is available from Hong Kong bookshops, priced $108 - or order online at www.blacksmithbooks.com.