There’s a question embedded in Catch-22 and every novel that follows in its tradition: what does it mean to serve a system that is, at its core, indifferent to the people who serve it? Lon Orey asks that question with humor rather than anguish, but the question is no less serious for the delivery.
Apricot Marmalade draws on Orey’s real experience in Vietnam-era Bangkok, and the comedy has the particular density of things that actually happened. The agents who populate the 187th Military Intelligence Detachment are funny because they are real — specific, human, equipped with specific human weaknesses that their institution has no mechanism to account for.
What survives the comedy is quieter: a portrait of ordinary people trying to do something that matters in a context that makes meaning very difficult to locate. That’s a story worth sitting with.
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