An unexcpected Hollywood ending to The Beauty of Humanity Movement

There are two - conflicting? - aspects to Camilla Gibb's novel The Beauty of Humanity Movement. In one sense, this is a very dark, embittered, almost cynical novel - virulently opposed to all three regimes or forms of government under which the people of (north) Vietnam lived, and in Gibb's account suffered. Life was horrible under French colonial rule, equally awful under the communist government of Ho Chi Minh, and no better under the democratic capitalism. All the promises to provide land and resources to the rural peasants and the urban poor are hollow; the government, particularly the communist government, is as autocratic and repressive as the Soviet state or Mao's China at their worst - in fact, even worse, because there is so little reason for this oppression. The novel focuses on the attempts to wipe out a fringe literary-political movement, the eponymous Beauty of Humanity (apparently based loosely on a real group) - and on the cost not only to the members of the group but to those loosely associated with it, notably the central character, a pho-chef, Hung. In the other sense, this is a sentimental and romantic book. The long-suffering urban poor such as Hung are noble and self-sacrificing and modest, they look out for one another in their shantytown, they save and struggle and get by through ingenuity. Perhaps all this is true, but it feels a little cliched and even two-dimensional - the characters are not rounded, but they are types, representing various social forces. Kind of reminds of the sentimentality of, say, Pearl Buck or maybe Steinbeck, though not as fully developed. More so, Gibb builds toward a grant romantic finale - Hung gets the pho restaurant he's always dreamed of, Maggie learns about her father and recovers some of his long-thought-lost art works and even gets a Vietnamese boyfriend (shoehorned very late into the plot), and so forth. In other words, a Hollywood ending, that doesn't quite sit well on the foundation of darkness that Gibb has put together.