The murder mystery in Those Opulent Days serves as a jumping-off point for a deep dive exploration and expose of the various complexities around racial and class disparities during 1928 French-colonial Vietnam.

As someone unfamiliar with Vietnamese history, I was fascinated by this glimpse into the country’s history. The way Vietnamese characters (referred to as “Annanites” in this novel) automatically provide more deference to French nationals, and the way in which wealthy Vietnamese characters set themselves apart from their poorer counterparts by adopting aspects of French culture, felt raw and distressingly true. They reminded me of how colonization by Spain and then the United States of America also resulted in similar ripple effects in the Philippines, where I grew up. Almost a century since independence, and we still talk about “colonial mentality,” and how we must fight against some of these beliefs that we have internalized.

The murder mystery centres on a quartet of friends from wealthy families: Duy, Phong, Minh, and Edmond. One of them ends up dead during a weekend at Duy’s family’s vacation home, and it isn’t till much later in the book that we learn who the victim was, and who may have wanted him dead. There isn’t much of an investigation, nor much suspense over the reveal. While the incident serves as a focal point for the events of the story (most of the novel’s events happen within a week of the death), the murder itself isn’t actually the focus of the story.

Rather, the story is about the lives of these four young men, and how the social inequities during the period play out in their families. I love how Pham explores the subtleties in their relationship through minor details, like how Duy’s family’s opium business makes them powerful in one way, but Minh’s family’s rubber business actually makes him the wealthiest of the group. More significantly, Edmond being French and white immediately accords him and his family prestige that even Minh’s wealthy and powerful family can’t achieve.

We learn how Phong is the smartest of the group, and how his father maintains his deceased first wife’s primacy by sending the children of all his subsequent wives to work in Minh’s factories and fields. We also learn how Edmond’s mother is so racist that she rubs her hand raw when a Vietnamese man accidentally brushes against it, never mind that he’s literally royalty. Pham sprinkles all these details throughout that truly make this world come to life. Whomever is killed, and whomever the murderer turns out to be, it’s clear that the villain in this novel is French colonization, and the way that Vietnamese people are second-class citizens on their own land.

Possibly because of this theme, the chapters I found most powerful are those from the perspectives of Vietnamese servants in Minh’s household: Hai, a kind-hearted maid whose romance with Minh threatens the elevated place in society that Minh’s mother has fought so hard to attain, and Tattler, an ambitious housemaid who hates the upper class until she realizes she actually really wishes to be one of them. Both are doomed by the circumstances of their birth and the society they must learn to navigate, and amongst all the glitzy glamour — the opulence, so to speak — the four main characters inhabit, Hai and Tattler’s chapters provide us a grittier counterpoint. Their stories show us that, however much we sympathize with Duy, Minh, Phong, and Edmond for their struggles within social structures, the four men are also somewhat complicit in keeping those structures going.

Hurt people hurt people, and this novel explores the many ways that power imbalances can lead to people lashing out to those who are less powerful. There’s a powerful moment near the end where characters are forced to confront the harsh limits of their own power, and yet there’s another, equally powerful, moment where power structures are subverted when a character takes control of their own destiny. Overall, this is a fascinating, multi-layered, and textured historical novel, one where a murder mystery is a powerful metaphor for all the complex and simmering tensions amongst a people longing to regain control over their own homeland.

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Thank you to Publishers Group Canada for an advance reading copy in exchange for an honest review.