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Published on February 24, 2008

Denis Johnson is a triple threat: poet, playwright and novelist. The 58-year-old American has written seven novels, six plays, three books of poetry and a book of global reportage to boot. When he won the 2007 National Book Award for his latest novel, "Tree of Smoke", he sent his wife to attend the ceremony in New York because he was too busy in Iraq.

I confess to reading only Johnson's second novel, "Fiskadoro", a slender post-apocalyptic tale set in the Florida Keys, published in 1995. Painting the visual horror as only a poet can, it was an impressive feat.

"Tree of Smoke" is his attempt at an epic novel about the Vietnam War. There have been great non-fiction books about Vietnam - Michael Herr's "Dispatches" and Neil Sheehan's "A Bright Shining Lie" spring immediately to mind - but despite a huge number, no great Vietnam novel. The closest might be "The Thirteenth Valley" by John Del Vecchio about the Ia Drang campaign. But he tried to cram too much in: long nightly historical and philosophical dialogues by exhausted soldiers who in real life would only have craved sleep.

"Tree of Smoke" takes place in eight sections, year by year from 1963 to 1970, opening with the assassination of John F Kennedy and ending with a coda in 1983. The centre of the action is Vietnam but the plot also wanders about the Philippines, Hawaii, Arizona, Malaysia and Thailand.

There are two groups of characters: the mystics and the grunts.

The grunts are two brothers from Phoenix, Arizona. Bill Houston starts off in the Navy in the Pacific. Younger brother James joins the Marines at 17 and ends up as a LRRP (Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol) scout in South Vietnam. Both brothers wind up in prison back home. There is an awful lot of drunken, repetitious, obscene dialogue at endless cross purposes. Pages and pages of it, in fact, proving how the lives of the grunts are indeed aimless and meaningless.

A drunken rampage by Bill Houston on Hawaii culminates at a slum bungalow where Bill's shipmate Kinney confronts a man behind a screen door about the US$260 (Bt8,500) he's owed. The violent climax is beautifully skewed:

"From his waistband [Kinney] pulled a blue .46 automatic and aimed it at the man, and the man dropped like a puppet with its strings cut and disappeared. Right at that time Houston heard an explosion. He tried to understand where this noise had come from, to find some explanation for it other than Kinney had just shot the man in the chest."

 Kinney says later: "I don't forgive my debtors. I don't forgive those who have trespassed against me."

The mystics in Vietnam are two CIA agents: Colonel Francis X Sands, a WWII veteran - Flying Tiger pilot and escaped POW from the Japanese - and his nephew Skip Sands, a freshly minted idealistic recruit. Here is Saigon's famous Continental Hotel, seen through his eyes:

"In the large, frantic lobby they sat in rattan chairs under one of the multitude of whirling fans. Around them beggars and urchins crawled at the feet of exiles and campaigners - at last, a wartime capital, a post lobby full of sagas, busy with spies and cheats, people cut loose and no longer accountable to their former selves. Deals struck in a half dozen languages, sinister rendezvous, false smiles, eyes measuring the chances. Psychos, wanderers, heroes. Lies, scars, masks, greedy schemes. This was what he wanted." 

 As a poet and playwright, Johnson's skill with description and dialogue is heroic. But as a novelist, he trips up on plot and it's a long fall for a 614-page novel. The plot moves along in jerks and starts with little interaction among the characters. The only connection the grunts have with the mystics is James's temporary service at a mountaintop base created by Colonel Sands.

The mystics are augmented by two Catholic priests - one French, one Vietnamese - and Kathy Jones, Canadian nurse and widow of Seventh Day Adventist missionary. The two bursts of romance, in the Philippines and Vietnam, between Kathy Jones and Skip Sands form one of the few tenuous emotional connections in the novel.

Other than that the plot is pure melodrama, punctuated by long, obtuse, mytho-religious dialogue among the mystics on subjects like doom, evil, fate, death and the hell that is Vietnam. The country is one long Grand Guignol series of gruesome atrocities. The plot wanders through a great many nebulous by-paths ending, absurdly enough, with some sort of jungle tribe sacrificial ritual and a gallows confession.

This reader, at least, had tossed away his credulity long before the end.