An Honourable Exit by Eric Vuillard review - Lucid historical fiction that packs a punch

To do so, Vuillard has refined a do-it-yourself approach to history, backed up by an inimitably idiosyncratic, opinionated, impassioned style.

Vuillard revels in writing short, lucid, episodic books which invariably pack an exceptional punch. The best known (The Order of the Day) re-creates a sequence of behind-the-scenes encounters from the 1930s, ones designed to reveal conspiracies, connivances and collusions with the evil which the Nazis personified. Vuillard's new book adopts the same technique, bringing the reader into one set-piece scene after another, as though the narrative were set for the stage, possessing all the intensely dramatic focus which should go with theatre.

An Honourable Exit is a French phrase about how withdrawal from war in Vietnam might be managed. The term is more familiar in the American adaptation, when Richard Nixon promised his electorate "peace with honour". In both cases, exit from Vietnam was managed in a more blood-soaked and far less honourable manner than either French or Americans, generals or politicians, had naively envisaged.

Vuillard commences with what seems like a digression, the addendum to a report on labour conditions on a rubber plantation from June 1928. The introduction recalls two of his other books, The War of the Poor and Congo, both of which trenchantly denounce tyranny and injustice on behalf of those oppressed and exploited.

In the case of the rubber plantation, labour inspectors exposed torture, de facto slavery and summary executions. That single instance of imperialism in progress is later amplified by Vuillard into a commentary on the influence exerted by mining interests on France's Indochina policies.

Vuillard then sets the plantation aside, moving on to his next dramatic scene, again allowing the reader to eavesdrop on history in action. Where other historians might load up on polemics or hypotheses, Vuillard strips down his subjects. His writing is spare, clear, deceptively simple. Building drama, changing perspective, bringing personalities to life, all those are tasks which an historian shares with an historical novelist.

The problem inherent in Vuillard's re-telling of history is not inadequate or inaccurate research, not at all, but rather the fact the readers need to know their history in advance to make sense of Vuillard's accounts. For An Honourable Exit, a reader needs rather more than a nodding acquaintance with the motives and thinking underpinning France's empire in Indochina, the military and financial constraints which contributed to its demise, and the weight of the critical Vietminh victory at Dien Bien Phu.

Having assimilated that background, the reader can revel in Vuillard's unerring eye for telling details. Edouard Herriot, President of the National Assembly, may seem roughly treated, given his standing as an advocate of radical causes, an opponent of Vichy and a distinguished historian. Here the president rouses himself "from his prodigious indolence", using his "thick, fur-covered paw" to admire an aperitif's "lemon-yellow hue with paleish-green tints".

On Vuillard goes. He pins politicians perusing a chart: "several bald heads formed a corolla around a large-scale map". When one general appears, "this is where we find him, intelligent, with a talent for explaining things clearly, and maybe a bit stuck-up". A vicious police commissioner is indicted not merely for stuffing the police force with thugs and toughs, but also for employing their wives as concierges, which is to say, neighbourhood dobbers.

These pen portraits might appear like the notoriously unsparing caricatures of the political class drawn by Honore Daumier during France's Second Empire (1830-70). Caricatures, though, tell the truth; they simply enlarge or exaggerate traits already present. For Vuillard here, as in The Order of the Day, sharp and sometimes cruel depictions of personalities may reflect a wider assessment of how well our leaders govern us.

Integrity, honesty, purpose and commitment, those are among the qualities which Vuillard seems - in vain - to be seeking among his historical subjects. The only historical figure Vuillard treats charitably is Patrice Lumumba, murdered shortly after he took over Congo.

Vuillard concludes with a secret conclave of business figures, all said to be complicit in profiting from a war they knew was lost.

Is this history, narrowly defined? The point is that there is no narrow definition of history, surely one of the most expansive, elastic and often eccentric disciplines of all.