The things they carried

Tree of Smoke
By Denis Johnson
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 614 pp., $27

Denis Johnson's apocalyptic, doom-and-grace-ridden Vietnam novel has a lot of fire in its belly, though even that may not be enough to justify its 600-plus pages. It's a river trip back down into the heart of darkness that belongs to every war, but was Vietnam writ in Day-Glo script, and the Mistah Kurtz here is an old patriot gone off the grid - a CIA Psy Ops cowboy known as the Colonel, who subsists mostly on conspiracy theories, memories of old football games, and Bushmills whiskey. He's the half-reluctant star power of "Tree of Smoke" (which boasts a handful of competing characters) because he's just so damn crazy and charismatic - there have been men like him in every war, and if you're lucky you never knew them. Not so fortunate is his nephew, Skip Sands - a sweet kid from the equally peaceable kingdom of Clements, Kan., who adores the Colonel so unwaveringly that, when asked by a CIA recruiter why he wants to join the Agency, he simply replies: "Because my uncle says he wants me as a colleague." That's the sort of loyalty that begets victory as well as treason, and by the end of "Tree of Smoke," Skip has proved himself capable of both. "There is one God, and many administrations," the Colonel is fond of quoting; it's telling that Skip takes this as earnest instruction about how to serve.

If Johnson has a signature theme throughout his work, it's a kind of quasi-mystical redemption on the other side of the abyss; his gorgeous prose and willingness to go deep have led the way through the scarily lightless corridors of his fiction. He has often seemed like a Robert Stone acolyte - his first novel, "Angels," was a tip of the hat to Stone's "Hall of Mirrors" - and "Tree of Smoke" reminds us of that connection: With its sad-sack priests and half-mad missionary nurses, its war-torn dialogue invoking Marcus Aurelius, it has the bulletproof ironic backbone of Stone's "A Flag for Sunrise," and it knowingly owes its heart to Graham Greene. But for sheer size and scope and determination, the novel is like nothing Johnson has done before.

The title of "Tree of Smoke" is from Scripture, and refers in part here to the vast map of information and possibility the Colonel keeps about the war - a cache of delusional theory that Skip has been indexing for his uncle for years. The dramatic tension of the novel belongs to this folie à deux. The Colonel is trying to run a double agent named Trung, a VC who has become disillusioned with the Marxist-Leninist strictures of the North Vietnamese; having proved himself complicit by staying silent during an off-the-books assassination, Skip spends half his time languishing at a hidden villa, waiting for further instruction. Given his virginal assumptions about God and country, it's fitting that Skip falls into a wartime liaison with Kathy Jones, a Seventh-day Adventist nurse whose husband's remains have just been found - theirs is the perfect mix of lust and despair, framing the tropical circle of hell to which they've both become accustomed.

But because the Vietnam War itself was a mass of conflagrations, tragedy, and mayhem slugging it out under a starless sky, Johnson has wisely chosen to fling his novel in several directions at once. "Tree of Smoke" unfolds in discrete year-marked chapters from 1963 to 1970, then shifts to a coda from 1983. And his interweaving plot lines move between the sinister-absurd world of the Colonel and Skip and the story of two brothers from Phoenix, Bill and James Houston - Bill an irascible seaman who keeps landing in the brig, James the kid brother who finds within the war a world more horrible and alluring than anything he could have imagined. A wide-eyed 17-year-old who lied to enlist, he volunteers to go into a tunnel, then signs up for long-range reconnaissance - the legendary Lurps - and re-ups for three tours of duty. Johnson has a novelist's affinity for the tough-guy loser - the killer with the broken heart, the fellow who takes a tire iron to a stranger because he neglected to call his mother. That's James Houston, or rather who he might well become, and he's portrayed with such chilling intimacy that you feel you've been inside the heart of a soldier turned inside out by war.

Juxtaposed against the surreal megalomania of the Colonel, James is the foot soldier for the moral no-man's-land of the war: the drunken adrenaline rush of Saigon, the military culture of pranks and sadism and blind retribution. The combat scenes, including those during the Tet offensive, are the brilliantly rendered backdrop for the Colonel's machinations - which inevitably wreak more destruction and misfires than mere ineptitude could ever accomplish. Even faced with the truth about his uncle, Skip realizes that the man is already headed into legend: "drunk, obsolete - absolutely unkillable." Lear of his tiny fiefdom, the Colonel gave up on God long ago, but he still believes in redemption. "I believe we'll wander in the darkness for a good long time," he tells his nephew, "and some of what we do here will never be made right, but we will be forgiven."

Everything in "Tree of Smoke" is there for a reason, even when it feels desultory and too passionately involved with its own meanderings - there are passages and detours on occasion (particularly the Colonel's mad philosophizing) that seem as labyrinthine as those infamous tunnels. But there are also moments of riveting intrigue, particularly a scene involving an exquisitely depicted German assassin. In a novel of this length and span, it's the authorial sensibility that mandates the story, and Johnson's is aptly fitted to the "vampire mausoleum" that was Vietnam: He captures the Machiavellian folly and addictive nightmare of the war as well as its walk off the cliff into darkness. Psy Ops was a netherland accustomed to such leaps, of course, and one of the Colonel's aficionados confirms their position: "We're on the cutting edge of reality itself," he says. "Right where it turns into a dream."

That's the sort of rock 'n' roll hubris that kept us where we shouldn't have been for years, and kept a lot of guys there forever.

Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com.