Tree of smoke

Tree of Smoke
By Denis Johnson

A 600- page feat journeying through a spectrum of the spiritual, ethical and physical extremes of the Vietnam War, and winner of the National Book Award for fiction, Johnson's ambitious novel brings to mind a latter-day manifestation of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

In this novel, naive and overly- enthusiastic CIA operative Skip Sands believes in the US, the land of dreams and its moral cause of defeating the Communists in Vietnam — and he certainly wants to witness that victory. With his uncle — a legendary army colonel — as his role model, and his own boyish belief in the promise of America, Skip is off to Nam, not ready to face the tarnishing images of the agency's brutal on-ground operations as they lose their way deeper in the wilderness of the situation, parallelling their own country as it falls into a trap of lost dreams and delusions.

Although his plotting style and character orchestration isn't his strength, Johnson has created an original, powerful story about the US experience In Vietnam, and one which offers a disturbing echo to the current American presence in Iraq.

Author of the week: Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson was born in 1949 in Germany, and was then raised in Japan and the Philippines. He went on to Washington and continued his studies at the University of Iowa, earning a Masters degree.

He started writing in the 80s, and his popular books were published one after the other in the next decade, starting with books like The Name of the World and Already Dead, to Fiskadaro, The Stars at Noon and Angels.

Apart from writing scripts and plays, which have culminated into sold-out performances until today, he has also written poetry, with his writings collected in the volume The Throne of Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly. He has received many awards for his work, including a Whiting Writer's Award, the Lannan Fellowship in Fiction (1993) and the 2002 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from The Paris Review for his work, Train Dreams.

After having just Chaired the Creative Writing Department at Texas State University, Johnson was awarded the National Book Award for his 2007 best- selling novel Tree of Smoke.

The writer is an International Student Correspondent for Notes studying at the University of Sydney, Australia