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Literary Review
WAR GAMES
At the cutting edge of reality
SHELLEY WALIA
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An unusually terrifying and cataclysmic novel.
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Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27.
It’s racy and it is a nightmare, it’s innovative and disorienting. It’s ironical and existential. And it is a welcome challenge to go through its sheer length. The National Book Award for fiction has gone this year to
Tree of Smoke, a far-reaching and compelling epic by Denis Johnson about the Vietnam War, a stunning example of a plan gone haywire where idealism gave way to disillusionment and cynicism.
Symbolism
The nihilism at the heart of the novel, which is Johnson’s first in a decade, is projected through the symbol of a maze of the Cu Chi tunnels in Vietnam. This directly reflects on the fate of most of the characters in the novel who finally experience disenchantment in the labyrinth of the Vietnam War, which in spite of initial promises had ended in a muddle of violence and death.
Johnson’s mesmerising novel too is a muddle, replete with twists, hallucinations, gaps, desolation, and crankiness. It seems there is a plan and a vision, and yet it all ends in perplexity and uncertainty. The several storylines coexist in a grand bitterness of war with all its trappings of surveillance, encounters and conspiracies. But more than being a war novel, it evolves into a psychological drama where the tussle is more with oneself and injuries rooted in self-infliction. The plot meanders in all directions, disjointed by abrupt shifts, now taking the reader into the strangeness of the war and the next moment zooming in on the terrible beauty of the Vietnam landscape.
The absence of linearity is a postmodernist skill emphasising the non-existence of a single universal truth. One perspective fades into another keeping the reader always a little wobbly with the ever amorphous storyline.
Remarkable creation
The novel is a remarkable creation of this milieu of a war torn world that appears more like a mystery and a locale right out of the Bible where characters are either starved or lost. The title taken from the Book of Joel is strikingly appropriate: “And I will give portents in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and palm trees of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.” Behind the dark face of the Vietnam War, Johnson sees the beauty of the landscape and the joy of life. Paradoxically the book turns into a scripture of war where horror of the Vietnam debacle jostles with ecstasy and elation.
Using the ploy of a nuclear attack and a Viet Cong double agent, the protagonist Francis Xavier Sands, nicknamed “Colonel’, imagines a strategy which he calls ‘tree of smoke’ to annihilate communism. He dreams of routing the enemy through various psychological strategies: he imagines sending his double agent into North Vietnam and then plans to plant a rumor about a nuclear attack on the Viet Cong. His betrayal culminates with the failure of the plan. He disappears in the end or is probably killed by his own colleagues in the CIA. In another sub-plot, James and Bill Houston return to the United States with wounded psyches to discover that killing in Vietnam means wining medals whereas back home, the award for similar action is incarceration. The war has extinguished their faith in God, in their country and themselves.
An unusually terrifying and cataclysmic novel, the Tree of Smoke, is a brave effort by a novelist who has recreated an experience in poetic language almost four decades after the deeply tragic war that incited worldwide resentment leaving the Americans not ‘ugly’, neither ‘brave’, but ‘fucking Americans’.
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