Tree of Smoke [Paperback]

Tree of Smoke is a difficult read; there are many viewpoints, many different characters, that interact over many years and many messages layered inside prose and dialogue which at times is nearly impenetrable. There is no central plot, which makes it hard to sustain interest and nearly all the characters are unpleasant, which makes it difficult to care about the outcome. I have to admit that I put this novel down several times, vowing never to return.

And yet I did.

Johnson's prose, although sometimes ponderous and circular, is more often, elegant and compelling. His masterful use of language renders the lack of story almost irrelevant; you end up reading on solely in search of the next breathtaking sentence. The novel's subject matter, style and construction, inevitably invite comparisons with Catch-22, the heights of which 'Tree of Smoke' never reaches, but it does contain some peerless war writing.

Many of the issues that Johnson tackles, despite being set in the Vietnam War, still resonate with current world events. The horrors and chaos of war are portrayed extremely well, as is the psychological toll on the combatants, the questionable suitability for combat, of those who volunteer to fight and society's inability to rehabilitate soldiers returning from conflict. The novel also looks at the fallibility of the intelligence services; how easy it is to find intelligence to support what you want to be true. If that wasn't enough, Catholicism and Religion also come under the lens of Johnson's microscope (The phrase 'Tree of Smoke', is taken from the bible.)

'Tree of Smoke' is weighty and thought-provoking stuff and it is very hard to sum up the novel in a review. Reading it from start to finish is a long, punishing journey but is not without its rewards. This may not be an exciting espionage novel, but Tree of Smoke's themes and above all it's vivid depictions of the chaos of war, will stick with me for a very long time.

I found "Tree of Smoke" utterly compelling. The devil is in the detail, or so they say, and the details of life during the Vietnam War are precisely set down in this long, melancholy book. The smells and sights of the country, both in the countryside and the cities, are vividly brought to life. Denis Johnson is also absolutely amazing at writing dialogue, you can hear the characters conversing in your head, and everything rang terribly true to me, the sometimes inane chats people had, the sometimes illuminating things people think.

However, if you are looking for a book with a strong, strong plot, this isn't it. The "Tree of Smoke" is a proposed secret CIA mission but in some ways the whole thing could be seen as a giant shaggy dog story. There is a also huge cast of characters to deal with (I heard from one bookseller that one customer had made a sort of time chart of them all to keep track) but they are all so different, so individual, that I didn't lose my place even though I stopped for 6 weeks in the middle of the book.

I truly believe that one day this book'll be regarded as a classic. It has tinges of Graham Greene and Conrad, with its preoccupation with how Vietnamese, Americans, Canadians, English and French interact in this strange setting or war. It also provides an extraordinary commentary on current imperial adventures, though I believe Johnson started writing the book many years ago.

Johnson's characters are often loners, alcoholics, people with griefs behind them, and this book is no exception, but lovers of excess may fall, like I did, for the wonderful "Colonel" who is a charismatic CIA leader with a nutty past... The pleasure of reading Johnson is just being there, watching it all go by. If you are the kind of person who could love to spend an afternoon in a café watching life drift by, this book's for you. If you want tight plotting, you might want to look elsewhere.

Were it not for the fact that this novel has just won America's National Book Award I would describe Denis Johnson as a vastly underrated writer. In this country certainly you would be hard pressed to find many who have read much of his output which includes fiction, poetry, plays and journalism. Which is a shame because he is well worth reading.

This vast novel (614 pages) contains huge themes, a cast list to rival any Shakespeare play and is no more or less than a War and Peace for the Vietnam era. I am not trying to make any grand claims for the book but it is almost impossible to read a novel this ambitious without seeing it in those terms. Coming 7 years after his last novel (the slim but equally fascinating The Name Of The World) and almost 35 years since the end of the Vietnam War, I was surprised to see such a tome, but there is nothing conventional about this book, it is a demanding read, it is flawed, but it is thrilling to see a writer of Johnson's talents tackling such an undertaking. Any attempt by me to summarise the plot or even just the characters will fail but here we go.

Beginning the day after the assassination of JFK, ('The dividing line between light and dark goes through the center of every heart. Every soul. There isn't one of us that isn't guilty of his death.') with a chapter for each year up until 1970 (with a coda in 1983) the plot revolves around William 'Skip' Sands, 'a young American man who alternately thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished himself to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the F**king American.' A CIA operative he starts in the Philippines and works in Vietnam eventually with his uncle, 'the Colonel', a Kurtz-like figure working in Psy-Ops. The Tree of Smoke of the title is 'the "guiding light" of a sincere goal for the function of intelligence- restoring intelligence gathering as the main function of intelligence operations, rather than to provide rationalizations for policy. Because if we don't, the next step is for career-minded power-mad cynical jaded bureaucrats to use intelligence to influence policy. The final step is to create fictions and serve them to our policy makers in order to control the direction of government' And for those British readers that may just remind you of a certain 'dodgy dossier'. For Americans we're into the realm of Rumsfeld's 'known unknowns'. The Colonel's eventual plan is to send false intelligence of a rogue American plot to bring the war to a swift conclusion with a tree of smoke in the form of a mushroom cloud.

But this is a multi-layered book and the real plot is that of war and how it affects all those who are involved in it. We have the Houston brothers James and Bill (who is the 'hero' of Johnson's debut novel Angels) and their Mother back home. Both of these boys becoming men in conflict and for James in particular the realisation that after all he has been through, he may not be suited to the ordinary life. We have various shadowy characters from the world of intelligence, Sergeant Jimmy Storm, Rick Voss, Anders Pitchfork, Dietrich Fest, the names alone should be making you want to read this novel. All of them operating in a region beyond the normal controls; 'We're on the cutting edge of reality itself. Right where it turns into a dream'.

As the moral centre of the book we have Kathy Jones who, recently widowed, meets Skip in the Philippines and they become lovers. When apart she writes him letters, telling him that when he reaches Vietnam he will find it like purgatory; 'Five or ten times a day you'll stop and ask yourself, When did I die? And why has God's punishment been so cruel?'. We also have several Vietnamese characters; Nguyen Minh who flies helicopters for the Colonel, his uncle Nguyen Hao who forms a relationship with the Americans and his close friend Trung, who attempts to assassinate the Colonel at the start of the novel, and will eventually become a double agent for the Colonel and the man to carry the false intelligence.

The novel's title has a biblical origin and with other references throughout, this is a book marked by religion. But this is a world forsaken by God or at least ruled by different administrations, one perhaps where he only exists as the desperate imagining of those who live in it. Loyalty, a recurring theme, leads many to think of Judas and Christ. We have a priest who has given up on prayer, a mother at home for whom 'prayer was all she had. Prayer and Nescafe and Salems'. The correspondence between Kathy and Skip is often struggling with faith. Vietnam itself is shown as a region of hell; a land and its people being destroyed by a nation trying to maintain faith.

What really stands out for me is the dialogue. It isn't there simply to forward plot but to brilliantly render character. From the idiomatic speech of the soldiers, the staccato phone conversations across continents, the vicious language of interrogation and conflict, Johnson's work recently as a playwright seems to have honed his already gifted ear for the speech of those at the margins, those living at the edge. He also has the ability to fill this violent novel with moments of real beauty and sadness.

Yes, it is flawed. But how could a novel like this not be. It is invigorating to read a writer dealing with such big topics and doing so fearlessly.