Thursday 19 October: Day of the Dead by Marshall Brement. A story set in Saigon in the 60s, as the US involvement there gets stickier and stickier. Brement’s protagonist is a junior embassy staffer, and we get an inside view of a crime, or a set of crimes, from the perspective of the administration that commits them.

Does realpolitik cancel out the ordinary definitions of crime? Who is guilty if nobody is responsible? If events simply take their course, and people “are murdered” does the passive voice absolve the non-actor?