Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson

The key to Tree of Smoke (2007) by Denis Johnson is confusion, ignorance, unawareness. The key question, in a sense, is whether confusion and ignorance absolve one of culpability. The main character is Skip Sands, a young CIA officer, who is assigned to Vietnam in 1966 and who hopes to be in the center of action. His uncle, Colonel Sands, is famed for his exploits, and Skip hopes his uncle's reputation will get him the kind of assignment he wants. Instead his uncle assigns him to live in a house miles from the action, and Sands spends much of his time in Vietnam doing nothing, reading the notes of the French doctor who once lived in the house and who was killed when a booby-trapped underground tunnel he was exploring exploded and collapsed on him. Sands is always on the outside of events, and somehow on the inside. He's like one of those souls forever imprisoned in Dante's limbo, guilty of moral indifference, guilty not of a failure to choose correctly but of a failure to make any choice at all, guilty of choosing ignorance rather than knowledge that would make him responsible.

Peripheral vision, confusion, uncertainty—these are the viewpoints from which Sands and Tree of Smoke view the war. It's also the perspective from which the reader engages with the novel.

The scope of this novel is expansive. It begins with a hundred-page narrative, set in 1965, of CIA activities in the Philippines and the assassination of a priest suspected (wrongly) of collaborating with an obscure enemy. Focused specifically on American involvement in Vietnam, it engages the totality of American foreign policy during the latter half of the 20^th century. In scope it might approach the momentous visions of Delillo's Underworld or Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. But there's a lack of detail here, a narrowed focus on Colonel Sands and his nephew and the people surrounding them, that vitiates the potential for depth and mythic import. There's much spectacle and intrigue here—the novel comes specifically to life in its descriptions of the Tet Offensive, in many ways the centerpiece of the book—but there's small opportunity for insight and understanding. Maybe the point is that Vietnam makes little room for such knowledge.

Tree of Smoke also concerns the issues of character and of guilt. Skip Sands is always on the periphery, mostly a witness to events of the war, but at the same time somehow deeply implicated. His uncle's renegade exploits, which he is not wholly aware of himself, implicate him as far as other CIA operatives are concerned. But implicate him in what? In criminal behavior, insubordination, acts of treason? We never clearly know. Maybe even Sands never knows. He just knows he's suspected. The novel gives the clear sense of a war that generates its own energy and momentum. No one is in charge. Everything is chaos. Depending on who you are, your national allegiances, your situation in a given moment, your view of the war and your place within it varies wildly. Is Colonel Sands an American hero, flaunting pointless bureaucracy, taking brave and courageous steps when no one else is willing, or is he a renegade, half-mad, driven by ambition and greed? No one knows. (Colonel Sands in this regard suggests Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1978)).

At the least, Tree of Smoke portrays a war in which issues of morality, of what is wrong and what is right, even of national policy, matter not a bit. The war lives outside the dimensions of justification and reason. It is its own phenomenon. Beyond it, the world doesn't exist.

When the novel ends, in 1983, we encounter Skip Sands as a wholly compromised individual, condemned to death in Malaysia for illegal weapons sales and other activities. He's been destroyed by the war as fully as others who died from gunshots or mine blasts.

The novel reminded me of two recent films about the CIA and American involvement in wartime espionage: The Good Shepherd (2006) and The Good German (2006).