The Devil's Snare: A Memoir of Saigon

Joseph Jones is librarian emeritus at the University of British Columbia
Library. He is the author of Reference Sources for Canadian Literary
Studies.

Janice Tait spent 1968–69 in Saigon. Around the age of 40, she took a
leave from teaching at Algonquin College, placed three young daughters
in a Toronto boarding school, and followed her diplomat husband on a
“hardship” assignment. This memoir has a number of threads. Foremost
is the life of a diplomat’s wife, which Tait makes clear she resented
and chafed at. She sees a parallel, more stated than developed, between
her disintegrating marriage and embattled South Vietnam.

Her direct observations encompass relations with house staff, dinner
parties, the physical discomforts of the tropics, impressions of street
life, volunteer ESL teaching, and considerable travel outside Saigon. A
good deal of the writing amounts to uninspired travelogue about trips to
Malaysia, Angkor Wat, and Tokyo. The darker side emerges in accounts of
street prostitution, mixed-race orphans, cages for the torture of Viet
Cong, and swaths of jungle defoliated by Agent Orange.

Having a discreet husband who followed protocol, Tait was told nothing
of the issues associated with his work. An acknowledgements page lists
three histories of Vietnam and the war that inform stretches of
retrospective potted history. (In other history, placing John Glenn on
the moon in 1969 is a remarkable blooper.) At one point Tait offers her
telling view that Canada acted as a Vietnam War arms merchant “without
the knowledge of the Canadian public.”

For the most part, Tait ignores the passage of a third of a century.
Little of the doubleness of recollection is present in her writing.
Toward the end of the book, one direct page confronts a topic that
otherwise peeks out from corners—her unhappy marriage. Those
revelations make the rest of the book seem like diversion. To the extent
that this memoir has interest, it lies in its being a manifestation of
the author’s 1950s sensibility, not in her pedestrian renderings of
the exotica of place and event.