This is a very good, though very dark, sometimes very violent, story of two French priests who go as missionaries in the 1770s & 80s to the divided Kingdom of Annam in Southeast Asia (what we know as Vietnam). One of the priests is doctrinally inflexible but skillfully manipulative & determined to form an alliance with the royal family that will make it possible to turn the kingdom into a French Christian colony; the other, his rebellious protege, after a crisis early in his ministry there, determines to side with the rebels who overthrow the ruling family, yet he cannot entirely free himself from the manipulations of his mentor. The author, a half-Vietnamese, half-American writer who shares a name with the ruling family in the story (based loosely on historical fact), seeks to understand the missionaries' motivations rather than to merely condemn them. He does, however, introduce a third character, a promising one who is a protege of the protege, but drops him largely out of the last third of the story. ( )