Jon Swain’s River of Time

A friend who’s always very reliable recommended Jon Swain’s River of Time, his memoir of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 1970s. I can’t believe I’d never read it before. An amazing recollection of the dog days of the Vietnam War, the rise of the Khmer Rouge and (most interestingly to me) the echoes of the old French Indo-China. A wonderful, wonderful read…. 

Between 1970 and 1975 Jon Swain, the English journalist portrayed in David Puttnam’s film, The Killing Fields, lived in the lands of the Mekong river. This is his account of those years, and the way in which the tumultuous events affected his perceptions of life and death as Europe never could. He also describes the beauty of the Mekong landscape – the villages along its banks, surrounded by mangoes, bananas and coconuts, and the exquisite women, the odours of opium, and the region’s other face – that of violence and corruption.