Diplomacy

About this book

"Sharing a title with Henry Kissinger's infamous book, Diplomacy is a grahic, conflict-fuelled drama on the international themes that have come to define our contemporary world. Nominally about Canada and America's active military involvement in the Middle East's many theatres of war, it scrutinizes the part the media plays in manufacturing our private reactions to foreign policy--how the new phenomenon of "embedded journalism" has become complicit in making everything personal, political. Roy deserted the US Army during the Vietnam War to become a historian specializing in Canadian diplomacy. His Vietnamese-born wife, Thu Van has flashbacks to the "shock and awe" she experience as a girl, while the new armed conflicts heat up in the Middle East where their daughter, An, serves as a Canadian diplomat in Damascus. Roy's best friend Sinclair is an ambitious, possibly unprincipled, newsman. His interest and obvious involvement in Thu Van's ublic self-immolation makes him decidedly suspect. "We don't need a lot of martyrs but we need a few," argues Thu Van in Sinclair's videotape of her suicide statement. Like diplomacy itself, perhaps none of Carlson's characters are new. But his dramatization of how our personal lives are increasingly shaped by what used to be called "public affairs" is compelling--the usefulness (or uselessness) of martyrdom certainly remains an overwhelmingl cntemporary queston. when suicide bombers blow themselves up daily as an act of war, is there any practical purpose to a single Vietnamese-Canadian sacrafice in the name of peace"--P.[4] of cover.