The stuff of nightmares

Fiction:All the lies, all the horror, all the guilt, all the cruelty. Never before has the story of the war that finished the national downfall, that began with the now mythic assassination in Dallas, Texas, been properly told - only now is the surreal madness laid fully bare.

Denis Johnson's brutal tour de force, Tree of Smoke, chronicles the death knell of the American Dream with relentless clarity. It is a nightmare come to life. This is a narrative that simply forces you to attend. It is an exhausting, demanding narrative; angry and raw because of its weighty burden of truth encased in multiple deceptions. Reading it will leave you reeling, weary and slightly ill.

It is, most certainly, the novel that Norman Mailer would have loved to have written, but he lacked poet and novelist Johnson's vicious artistry, irony and the unnerving detachment to forgo all polemic and instead allow a damaged group of characters to populate the pages, and south-east Asia. As efficiently as mime artists, their actions prove eloquent. But Johnson also gives them speech in passages of dialogue so real it hurts. But then, Tree of Smoke is intended to hurt, to hurt and clarify.

Vietnam remains a moral vacuum. It was the first time the US went to war without a heroic halo - and returned heavy with shame to remain so ever since.

Johnson has proved astute; he has waited and watched. By keeping vigil over the aftermath and the shaky history that has evolved since the final withdrawal from Saigon, he has come closer than any writer, including Robert Stone and even those who wrote eye-witness accounts of combat, to explaining why what happened should never have occurred. Maybe current events in Iraq have helped him - or perhaps that should read, forced him - to complete a story that is so difficult to tell. This is a novel about war that is really about chaos, fear and duplicity. Sustaining it throughout is Johnson's extraordinary grasp of the atrocities humans commit. One of the many truths confronted in it, is the reality that there is a point at which compassion becomes contempt and that contempt then becomes indifference.

Dehumanisation may ultimately be Johnson's central thesis. A character arrives buoyed up by idealism, or at least ambition, only to be corrupted by the easy sex, the heavy drinking endemic in occupied zones. This is not The Naked and The Dead, nor is it Catch 22. Tree of Smoke may read as a time bomb but its dark power should not be all that surprising.

Denis Johnson, along with Russell Banks and to a less well known extent, Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter's Bone, belongs to an elite band of US writers possessed of a terrifying understanding of human nature. They understand America and explore the US in its political, social and cultural contexts, without relying on heavy polemic.

One of the strongest entries in The Picador Book of Contemporary American Stories (1993) edited by Tobias Wolff, is Johnson's Emergency which had earlier featured in his short fiction collection, Jesus' Son. His supremely offbeat novel, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (1991), follows a young man with a quest - the slow road to recovery after a suicide attempt: "He came there in the off-season. So much was off. All bets were off. The last deal was off. His timing was off, or he wouldn't have come here at this moment . . . He'd been through several states along the turnpikes, through weary tollgates and stained mechanical restaurants, and by now he felt as if he'd crossed a hostile foreign land to reach this fog with nobody in it . . ."

Existential hells in defiantly well described physical settings are Johnson's speciality. In his finest book to date, The Name of the World (2000), Michael Reed, a professor at a Midwestern university lives a posthumous life following the death of his wife and child in an accident. For some four years he continues in a life of the walking dead, unwilling to even remember his wife, finally he attempts to recall her.

"Whereas before I'd chased away any memories of her, now I found myself catching at what I could, and it was less and less. Anne drank a lot of black coffee. She liked cinnamon-spiced chewing gum . . . she frowned when something struck her as funny. Human stupidity tickled her, she wore the world lightly, and that was important to me . . ." His situation suddenly changes and he is challenged.

All of this is revealed in a mild, low-key voice by Reed, a man with a flair for forensic detail, sly humour and images of savage beauty. By the end of what is a virtuoso performance, Johnson has placed Reed in a new life as journalist covering the Gulf War. In the light of Tree of Smoke, it now seems prophetic.

THE NEW BOOK is written in the third person, and this narrative distance is vital. Instead of engaging the reader as a conspirator as in The Name of the World, Tree of Smoke demands a reader who is prepared to be a witness.

A young GI enters a jungle clearing somewhere in the Philippines. He is recovering from an almighty binge, and "feeling sober again" leans his borrowed rifle against a tree, and looks around for something to shoot. And that something obliges. On seeing movement in the trees, he takes aim and misses. His quarry turns a small monkey.

"Seaman Houston took the monkey's meagre back under the rifle's sight. He raised the barrel a few degrees and took the monkey's head into the sight. Without really thinking anything at all, he squeezed the trigger."

What follows is eerily exact. "The monkey flattened itself out against the tree, spreading its arms and legs enthusiastically, and then, reaching around with both hands as if trying to scratch its back, it tumbled down to the ground. Seaman Houston was terrified to witness its convulsions there. It hoisted itself, pushing off the ground with one arm, and sat back against the tree trunk with its legs spread out before it, like somebody resting from a difficult job of labour ." The soldier is horrified. "With fascination, then with revulsion, he realised that the monkey was crying."

It is a powerful sequence told without a crumb of sentimentality. It could almost serve as a metaphor for the entire novel; helpless victims felled by mindless violence. Except nothing is as simple as that, and this big novel is far from simplistic.

One of the characters, the colonel, a CIA operative, is as brutal a man as has ever stomped across a brothel floor and an outstanding example of characterisation which never becomes full caricature. His life is about excess - drinking, smoking, having sex and living off his reputation as a college football star and later as a second World War hero. Stationed in south-east Asia where he is living it up, he still sheds large tears for the dead president, whom he decides "was a beautiful man . . . that's what killed him".

Skip Sands, the colonel's nephew, arrives, fired more by ambition and the realisation that he has good contacts than by idealism. He is a major character and a study in ambivalence.

Part of Johnson's genius is the layer of ambivalence that lies over every word, every action, every character, the entire novel. The 1960s pass and with each year, the characters become further entangled in the many sub plots.

CENTRAL TO THE story are the lives of two no-hope brothers, Bill Houston, the monkey slayer, and his younger brother, James, who eventually gets his wish and heads off to Vietnam where he also pursues more drugs and more sex. They are the sons of the same mother, a defeated ranch hand whose only interest is religion. The brothers stumble through life as does, in time, younger brother Burris. Meanwhile Skip, never quite heroic, never fully corrupt, quickly loses all sense of what is right. He becomes reactive.

There are many wonderful set pieces, often spinning on cultural contrasts: "In the United States we don't eat dogs. Dogs are our friends," remarks Skip, only to be told: "But you are not in the United States now. This is Vietnam. You're far from home, and this is a sad day." Skip has been informed of the death of his mother. Johnson makes telling use of the effect hearing of death from elsewhere has on soldiers at war. It is, as one character reflects, not what you expect. Death is not supposed to happen elsewhere any more.

Another character, Fest, also a spy, is German and is anxious to hear news of his dying father. "Meanwhile, the old man would die. Perhaps already. Perhaps yesterday while I bought the maps. Right now he's dead while I shower in tepid, diseased water . . . People die when you're thinking of something else."

Tree of Smoke is dominated by the 1960s and over the span of the closing 100 pages the action carries through the 1970s and on to 1983. By then, one of the main characters, Kathy, a Canadian who has served her time in the battlefields of Asia as well as in relationships, is hurrying to a meeting. She is grazed by a passing car. "She leapt back, the blood sparkled in her veins - nearly dead that time." Her character provides the narrative cohesion. Through her we see how Vietnam continues to pick at the soul of America.

Earlier this year Don De Lillo portrayed the US of today in Falling Man, Johnson has revisited and taken a hard look at a not too distant seminal period. From the smallest phrase, a single image, to a daunting panoramic shot, Johnson pursues this story and makes it his own. Dense and physical, it is neither a lament nor an elegy. Candour best describes the tone of what is an earthy, often ugly tale but one brilliantly told. Having last week won the US National Book award for fiction, Tree of Smoke should also collect the Pulitzer Prize, but what really matters is that Denis Johnson has proved that fiction can, and does, unnerve.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

Denis Johnson's Vietnam War novel is a brutal tour de force of vicious artistry Tree of Smoke By Denis Johnson Picador, 614pp. £16.99