Tree of Smoke: A Novel by Denis Johnson
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Book Reviews of Tree of Smoke: A Novel
Book Review: On The Cutting Edge of Reality
Summary: 5 Stars
"Tree of Smoke" is long, yes, and mostly talk. Especially for a war book, keep in mind that it's mostly talk. It's also compelling and riveting in its own unique way. I don't know what I would compare it too, but it's dense like Ken Kesey or Charles Dickens and epic like, say, "Catch 22." It works on the fringes of the war, as one character calls it, "on the cutting edge of reality, where it turns into a dream."
So, a caution right up front: if you are looking for Vietnam war action like the movie "Platoon," look elsewhere. This book takes place, for the most part, above and around the war. There are a few exceptions, but the book seems to be as much about what it takes to fight and to win a war. It's about the psychological warfare, deception and spies. But at every level, "Tree of Smoke" examines what it takes to go to war, to conduct a war, to believe in war. "We've lost the war, we've lost the heart," says one character and we all know where Vietnam ends up, so the arc is predictable but Johnson's ability to imagine these conversations and these characters is what keeps you going.
I think what Johnson is saying more than anything is that it takes faith and firm belief to wage war and to win one.
Recommended for readers who enjoy a long, thoughtful and hearty meal. This is the opposite of a quick-paced thriller; it's slow and contemplative.
One note: I listened to this book on audio CD. I've seen some other comments about Will Patton's performance being less than stellar. Hardly. Patton's delivery is brilliant. Terrific and subtle nuances in his delivery made each character distinct - a Brit, a Filipino, the Americans, the Vietnamese - and his inflection was nearly as brilliant as the dialogue. What a great book to listen to, particularly with Patton as your guide.
Book Review: A Bright and Shining Truth
Summary: 5 Stars
I've been a fan of Johnson for some time now. To me Johnson is the American Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Tree of Smoke struck me as quite a bit better than his earlier books (those that I read anyway.) Johnson has always attempted to inject philosophical and religious points into his narratives and in his past works it was done rather awkwardly and unrealistically (e.g., the hit-man quoting Nietzsche in Already Dead.) But in Tree of Smoke he gets it right, the characters spiritual and philosophical underpinnings are woven seamlessly into the plot and make for an incredibly rich experience. The multitude of characters from very diverse backgrounds provide a wealth of different perspectives on life and faith. I especially appreciated that some of the main characters were Vietnamese. (I find that most American's are so self absorbed they can talk about the Vietnam War for hours and never mention the Vietnamese.)
Also, I have to mention that the softcover edition's binding is fantastic. I was easily able to hold the book splayed open with one hand.
Book Review: Tree of Smoke
Summary: 5 Stars
A deep and sad book about the American hallucinogenic involvement in Asia, specifically the Philippines and Vietnam. It's a novel but like all great novels is more real that any factual account can be. Other reviewers cover the plot and the characters; suffice it to to say the characters are helpless against the inevitability of tragedy. I served in Korea ( before the time of the novel which begins in 1963) and for me the tone of the prose is exact. I detected perhaps Graham Greene as an influence and also maybe John Dos Passos - this book is a great companion to the Dos Passos' masterful ( and neglected) "USA" written in the 30s.
Book Review: Fascinating, Frustrating, Brilliant
Summary: 4 Stars
The skinny: I loved Tree of Smoke, but I'm going to take some time this weekend to figure out more precisely why - this book fascinated and frustrated me. It's a very different type of Vietnam novel, focusing on the "secret war" instead of on the clash of arms, although there's that as well. But it's not verismo along the lines of The Things They Carried or psychedelic verismo a la Going After Cacciato - two great novels of Vietnam. Like ambitious Vietnam books, it speaks to broad topics on which it's hard to have an original thought. Yet Johnson succeeds and seems a wholly credible witness to the times and places he writes about so stylishly. For me, as good as his eye is and as intriguing as the Byzantine machinations of his characters, Johnson's brilliant dialogue carries the story - at at once tough, believable, and literary, and integral to the layering of Johnson's deep, organically wrought cast of Americans, Vietnamese, Brits, Germans, and others. (I frankly don't understand the fusillades he's drawn on both his dialogue and his characters.)
Tree of Smoke struck me more than a few times as an odd Asian doppleganger-counterpart to Roth's American Pastoral - depicting "the War that Deranged the Americans," individually and in their clusters of society, both home and abroad, exposing all their tender nerves and mythologized beliefs. Johnson gives us more than a few Kurtz-like figures, and Conrad resonates throughout the descent of Skip Sands, "Johnny Storm," and others into various forms of call-it-what-you-will. Johnson's Houston brothers vault from SE Asia to invade/descend into Roth's American scene, although two-thirds a continent away from suburban New Jersey. I suppose this kind of thing - call it "madness as a metaphor" for short, but the book is so much more than that - are about as hackneyed in a Vietnam novel as anything else; after all, for many writers, soldiers, and civilians, Vietnam was the psychedelic war, and the psychotic war, and many other related things to many people. But in my reading, Johnson gives this new and plausible depth and dimensions. And he does so, I should add, with a ferocious sense of humor and with descriptive powers that are flat-out supernatural. On page 4, in which he spins out the fate of an unlucky higher jungle primate, we get an early display of Johnson's powers, a hint of his sensibility, and a sense of how this may all play out.
I've docked the book a star for its threadbare "Ah....the nefarious CIA devours its own" theme that so many writers are drawn to. Democracies have a hard time with secret organizations, and democratic peoples spin yarns - delirious imaginings, conspiracies, short stories, novels, editorials, and such - about anything they can't peer into as deeply as they wish; I'm more than a little tired of this, and I apologize for a pet peeve. (If having said as much seems a spoiler, it will be one for only the most obtuse of readers, to include anyone who takes on the book without first having read the dust jacket or the cover of the paperback.)
But in the end, a lot of readers - as we can see from the reviews of those who were less impressed with the book than I was - will wonder about what Johnson has left us with. For so protean a novel, each of us will decide for ourselves. I'd like to ponder it a bit more. It's (obviously) not a book for everyone. It's talky. It takes its own sweet time. It's extremely calculated in its ambiguities. Readers who are not of Johnson's generation, who weren't devouring newspapers in the 1960s and 1970s, or who were never in uniform, may view much of this novel as obscure or pedantic. But Johnson ties things up pretty well by page 614, and Tree of Smoke gripped me, hard. To me, it created a literary world well worth inhabiting, and it made me want to read a great deal more Denis Johnson.
Book Review: A Cross between HEART OF DARKNESS and CATCH-22
Summary: 4 Stars
TREE OF SMOKE revolves around Colonel Francis X. Sands, a civilian operative for the CIA who has his own base and his own recon contingent and even his own helicopter. The Colonel is a renegade of sorts and he soon gets himself in Dutch with the higher ups in the CIA. His troubles begin when he writes an article for the CIA publication outlining the differences between intelligence and analysis. Intelligence officers collect the data but their superiors may misinterpret it for political reasons or for their own personal advancement. The Colonel is an alcoholic and really can't articulate what he wants to say so he has another man translate his ideas. This man turns him in to his superiors. Matters go further south when the CIA murders a Catholic priest in the Philippines who was mistakenly rumored to have been providing arms to Moslem revolutionaries.
If there is a main character in the story it's "Skip" Sands, the Colonel's nephew, also a CIA operative whom the colonel seems to be protecting. He is given out of the way assignments and his main job seems to be to type and organize the Colonel's interview files. While in the Philippines he witnesses the murder of the priest and also has an affair with Kathy Jones, a Canadian missionary whose husband Timothy has been murdered by the rebels. The story moves from 1963 just after Kennedy's assassination to 1983.
In 1969 the Colonel is "running" a double agent named Trung, of the Vietcong; the other CIA agents are highly suspicious because of the Colonel's idea to try to make the North Vietnamese believe that some renegade CIA agents want to plant an atom bomb in Hanoi harbor. They think he just might do it.
There are also two brothers, William and James Houston. William is in the Navy and seventeen-year-old James joins the Army, where he becomes a LURP or tunnel rat, special operatives who go down in the Vietcong tunnels, often high on speed, to ferret out Charlie. Both of these guys are seriously messed up, but they just might be the most interesting characters in the book. Both get in bar fights and have little respect for women, even their own mother, a religious fanatic. Both do prison time. At one point William Houston wonders when some disaster will come along and push him into making something of himself. He's twenty-six at the time.
TREE OF SMOKE carries on the modern tradition of parading as many viewpoint characters on stage as possible. There are the two Sands, there're the Houston brothers, there is Kathy Jones, there's Trung and a South Vietnamese businessman named Hao who is just trying to stay alive and wind up on the right side; there's also Ming, the colonel's helicopter pilot, and Jimmy Storm, a sort of aide de camp to the colonel, who is definitely a CATCH-22 character. Towards the end of the book he goes looking for the mysterious colonel who's supposed to be dead. The colonel has a mysterious element that will remind you of Kurtz in HEART OF DARKNESS.
Have patience with this one. Don't listen to the people who flunked the marshmallow test; it's a decent comment on the Vietnam war without a whole lot of battle scenes; it also includes some subtle and not so subtle tie-ins with our modern quagmire.