Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson
“Mission Impenetrable.”
This review marks my first foray into the New York Times’ Top 100 books of the 21st century (so far), with Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke clocking in at 100. The novel covers a bit of ground, focusing on the CIA’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
As a subject, Johnson has much to draw from. The Central Intelligence Agency grew out of the World War II-era “Operation of Special Services” and has never managed to reconcile competing impulses: to function as a “newspaper” to inform policy decisions, which was what President Truman wanted, versus the thirst for operational adventurism. Should the CIA employ librarians or spies? The binary thinking of the Cold War provided space for both of these contradictory approaches, at times in excess.
During the Vietnam War, for example, the CIA ran operated without oversight. Like hobgoblins amok in the witching hours, American agents did everything from collect human intelligence (HUMINT) to puppet mastering the South Vietnamese government. The CIA’s “Operation Phoenix” against the Vietcong resulted in human rights abuses, including the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians.
Johnson’s tale takes us year-by-year, from Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 to 1970, along with an postscript in 1983 to tie up loose ends. He uses a Eugene O’Neill-amount of words to tell his tale, which my last CIA read did as well. Granted, I’m not working with a large sample size here, but perhaps intelligence work attracts those with a certain love for language?
Other than the time blocks, Tree of Smoke lacks traditional story structure. Instead, Johnson organizes the novel as a series of interweaving character sketches. The cast includes Colonel Francis Xavier Sands—whose whole being constitutes a reference to Marlon Brando’s Colonel Walter Kurtz in the film Apocalypse Now (in turn, an adaption of Joseph Conrad’s classic novel Hearts of Darkness). Sands has fought the good fight in Southeast Asia since his days with the “Flying Tigers” in China against the Japanese in the early 1940s and now runs afoul with Langley by running his own Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) projects without authorization. He’s a devout Cold Warrior who drinks an astounding amount of alcohol.
Sands’ nephew, Skip Sands, reflects the Brown University grads with a thirst for thrills that the CIA recruited in the 1950s. Skip functions as much as a protagonist as anyone in the book, as he tries to help his uncle with his latest sketchy project. Other characters include Kathy, a professional do-gooder who has an affair with Skip after her husband’s death. Brothers Bill and James Houston come across as ne’er-do-wells from rural Arizona. We also get a glimpse into a variety of Vietnamese who choose various sides of the conflict.
The title Tree of Smoke refers to one of Colonel Sand’s operations that seeks to feed false information to a Vietcong double agent named Trung Than, whose lifelong friend Nguyen Hao brings him in from the cold. The phrase itself derives from various Biblical passages, including selections from Song of Solomon, Joel, and Exodus, although the evangelical resonances overlay with the Vietnam War afterimage of burning villages. We also hear the refrain of “the same mission” but with “different administrations,” which Kathy tells us via a letter to Skip comes from Corinthians 12:5-6.
Like Hearts of Darkness, Tree of Smoke takes us deep into the liminal space of a distant jungle. I thought of William Blake’s lines as Johnson’s G.I.’s stagger from one dive bar to the next, “Tiger tiger, burning bright / In the forest of the night. / What immortal hand or eye, / could frame thy fearful symmetry.” We might also imagine all those Rousseau paintings with yellow eyes glowing in the gloom, projections of westerners’ Orientalist fantasies. Adding to the sense of fable, naming conventions stand in for qualities like a medieval morality play, such as “Screwy Loot,” “The Black Man,” and “Cowboy Corporal.” Character arcs intersect with deus ex machina randomness. None of the characters’ stories end well and Johnson seems to suggest that the difference between soldiers and drifters can amount to the uniforms they wear.
To be frank, I found the book difficult to follow. Johnson has an ear for dialogue that rivals playwrights like David Mamet. He pens speech with so much verisimilitude, though, that passages read how drunk soldiers talking in a bar in Saigon would sound in real life. Needless to say, such a verisimo style proves dizzying after 600 pages.
“Are the VC moving in?”
“I haven’t been bothered.”
“What have they got you doing over there?”
“Collecting stories. Folktales.”
“Gimme a break! Rick, here, thought you’d left the country.”
“I’m in and out.”
“So the base is broken down?”
“We didn’t call it a base. Landing zone.” Sands seemed inexplicably content.
Yeah. No idea.
A certain amount of surreality seems appropriate given that the Vietnam War feels unreal. Probably most who served there at some point asked what they were doing halfway around the world in a conflict they did not understand. As the book makes pains to point out, America took over colonial duties from the French based on abstract political concepts rather than vested interests. Corruption ran rampant through our local allies while the Americans commanded the skies, the enemy often held the moral high ground. Above all, the Vietnamese evinced a capacity for suffering that allowed them to win the long game.
War makes for compelling stories and the Vietnam War continues to fascinate. Like Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial in Washington, D.C. concretizes, the conflict has left a scar on America’s psyche. As a psychological operative, Colonel Sands would know more about psychic damage than anyone and so has much to teach us. Critics hail this book as a bold literary stroke, which I can see. If you want recognizable, albeit idealized, plots to make your pulse race though, stick with John le Carré.