Tree of Smoke

The test is subtractive, and it finds much that could go; the axis is the lowest of the twelve. The spine is required: the Colonel’s operation and his legend, Skip’s apprenticeship to it and his loss of faith in it, the double agent through whom the fiction is to be fed, and the war’s slow corruption of every man who serves it. The Houston brothers, the war from below, are a needed counterweight. What holds the axis at the threshold is a looseness beyond design: the brothers barely touch the main action, Skip’s years over the card files run long, episodes open and do not close, and the coda of 1983 gathers survivors rather than consequences. That a war of fog should be told in fog carries part of the length, not all of it.

Score: 7.5 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds: the American war in Vietnam was fought in large part on stories, and the men who made the stories came to believe them. The Colonel’s operation is a fiction made to deceive an enemy, and it ends by deceiving the agency, the nephew and the Colonel himself. The book follows the moral cost down the chain, from a legend who believes in his own mission to a private soldier who comes home unable to live at peace anywhere. Against it stands Kathy Jones, whose faith survives her husband’s death. Held below the gate because the finding had been made before, by Greene and by Herr, and because much of what the book gives is a mood of drift and damnation rather than a meaning it states.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Elevation is frequent, and it is the book’s distinctive power: a prose that reaches visionary height out of ordinary squalor. The opening sets the pitch, a monkey shot by a young sailor on the day of Kennedy’s death, an absurd killing set against a national grief. The Colonel’s tales of his own war, told as legend, have a grandeur the book lets stand and then undermines. Storm’s descent into madness after the Colonel is gone, and James Houston’s in the field, reach real terror; Kathy’s grief and her late faith reach a strange tenderness. Held below the higher reaches because the long middle runs at ground level, in archive work, drinking and talk, and its heights are fewer than the book’s pitch promises.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Myth evoked strongly and built in part. The Colonel is the book’s Kurtz: a man of genius and appetite who goes up the river of his own legend, and whose follower Storm, after his death, becomes a second Kurtz in the jungle. That pattern is load-bearing, and the book knows it comes after Conrad and after Coppola. The uncle and nephew are a father and son of a fallen order, the son apprenticed to the father’s myth and orphaned by it; the Houston brothers are a fallen pair at the bottom of the same world; Kathy’s theology frames the whole as fall and possible redemption. Held below the gate because several patterns are summoned rather than carried, the Conrad most of all, and the title’s column of smoke stays an image more than it enters the action.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The inheritance is plain and heavy: Conrad; Greene’s The Quiet American; Michael Herr’s Dispatches; the Vietnam fiction of Tim O’Brien; and above all Robert Stone, whose Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise had already joined the spy, the drug and the spiritual crisis in an American novel of Asia and Latin America. The turn is Johnson’s own: the visionary, broken-down sentence of his poems and stories carried into a long epic of the intelligence apparatus, with a theological seriousness the war novel had seldom allowed. The stake was real: a writer whose fame lay in short, ecstatic forms staked years on the largest book of his life. Held well below the gate because instrument and matter were both largely inherited, and the swerve lies in coupling a voice to a received form.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Change the form and some of the knowledge goes. The braided strands, from a Colonel’s operation to a private soldier’s patrol, show the war from above and below at once, and the reader, like the agency, holds more pieces than any character and still cannot see the whole. The year headings make time the governing measure: the war is a span that corrodes, not a plot that resolves. The Colonel’s card archive, which Skip spends years ordering, is the form seen inside the book, a mass of fragments that promises a pattern and yields none. Held below the higher reaches because the chronicle is a roomy and general form, the same knowledge could be carried in half the length with fewer strands, and the Houston strand stands beside the main one more than it is fused to it.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, and nineteen years supply a little. The questions the book plants stay open: what the operation called Tree of Smoke actually was, and whether it was ever more than the Colonel’s dream; how the Colonel died, and who was responsible; whether Skip’s later course is a fall or the only honesty left to him; whether Kathy’s grace answers the war or merely survives it. Readers return for the prose, and the prose rewards return. Held here because the critical literature is small beside that of the other long American novels of its decades, the book has not yet had the decades of re-examination the axis prefers, and part of what returns is obscurity in the plot rather than depth.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The field is American fiction of its decade, and within it the long war novel. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that the visionary manner of Johnson’s short fiction could be sustained over an epic, and brought a religious seriousness to the novel of American intelligence. It did not reorganise what the war novel could do; Stone and Herr had done that. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the National Book Award for Fiction in 2007, wide and serious notice, the claim of some reviewers that it is the finest novel of the Vietnam war, and translation; but little sign that it has redirected what came after, and a standing still contested between readers who hold it Johnson’s masterpiece and readers who find it diffuse.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Survival is weighed over nineteen years, on what has been shown. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print since its appearance. Presence is real but not wide: the book is read and named among the major American novels of its decade, its prize keeps it in view, and its author’s death in 2017 renewed attention to all his work; it is less taught and less read than Jesus’ Son, and much less than the war novels it follows. Its surface is not fixed to the moment of its writing: it is a historical novel, and its period is its matter, not an accident of date. Nineteen years demonstrate little beside the centuries behind the summit, and the figure sits at the lower end of the usual for its span.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Judged on Johnson’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the sentence and of speech: the talk of soldiers and agents is exact in idiom and rhythm, bored, profane and abruptly lyrical; the narrative sentence moves from flat report to vision without a seam; the Vietnamese characters are given an English of their own, without condescension. Single scenes are made with great skill. Three charges hold the axis below the higher reaches: the management of a long book is uneven, with stretches where incident gathers without pressure; several minor figures are hard to tell apart; and the plot of the operation is so withheld that the reader’s confusion at times reads as the author’s.

Score: 8.4 / 10

One law governs, broadly: men live by the stories they tell themselves, the war is the place where those stories are tested and fail, and what survives the failure is damnation or grace, and the book will not say which a man will get. Take the two most distant elements: the Colonel’s operation, a high game of deception run from villas and safe houses, and Bill Houston drifting through bars and ships at the bottom of the same world. Both are lives run on a fiction that collapses, and Kathy’s faith is the same law seen from its other side. Charged: the strands keep their own physics more than they share one, the spy plot running on suspense and withholding and the Houston strand on picaresque drift, and the coda joins them by survival more than by consequence.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Many orders, and the war holds them. The state, in the agency, the army and the policy above both. History, across twenty years from Kennedy’s death to the aftermath. War itself, at every level from the operation to the patrol. Religion, in Kathy’s faith and the Colonel’s mysticism of power. The family, in the uncle and nephew and in the Houston brothers and their mother. Vietnamese society, through Hao, Trung and the villages, given more room than in most American novels of the war. Love and desire, in Skip and Kathy. Labour, in relief work and soldiering. One condition, service to a fiction, joins them. Held below the top because the Vietnamese order is seen mainly as it bears on Americans, and the strands sit side by side more than in one structure.

Score: 8.3 / 10