Francois Bizot: The Gate

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Stories are all in the telling, they say. Well, you could put the events in this book into a Hollywood movie and their sheer drama and horror would easily sustain two or three hours' "entertainment". But Bizot shows what can be discovered from human fear, horror and ideology when they are filtered through the mind of an extraordinarily intelligent and humane man, one whose own consciousness is unconstrained by political ideology.

French scholar Bizot went to Cambodia in 1965 to study Buddhism. He married a Cambodian, had a daughter, and lived in a village in the centre of the Angkor site. Then in October 1971 he was seized by the Khmer Rouge, at that time still fighting against the American-installed Lon Nol government. For three months he was shackled to a tree, bargaining for his life with his torturer, a young commando named Douche, who was later to become the notorious master of the Tuol Sleng interrogation centre.

Following his miraculous release he lived in Phnom Penh until it fell to the Khmer Rouge in April 1975. Then began a terrifying period trapped inside the French Embassy, behind the eponymous "gate", observing the devastation being wrought upon the Cambodian population in general, and the thousand or so refugees inside the French compound. As a Cambodian speaker, and with great negotiating skills, Bizot became the go-between, allowed out into the city to scavenge for food for the political prisoners.

Looking back after 30 years — "exhuming", as he puts it — his memories are as fresh and bitter as the margosa roots he so loves.

Throughout his story, Bizot insists, angrily at times, on the humanity of both himself and the victims and aggressors he comes across. This is not a soft approach — it rather asks the question Primo Levi has already posed: if this is a man ...

Cambodia for Bizot is the end of ideology: "I detest the notion of a new dawn in which Homo sapiens would live in harmony," he writes. "The hope this Utopia engenders has justified the bloodiest exterminations in history."

* Vintage, $27.95