![]() ![]() Is he visionary or madman, patriot or traitor? Dead or alive? Or, somehow, all of the above? Because the reader perceives the Colonel (as he is reverently known) through the eyes of other characters, he shimmers like a kaleidoscope of shifting impressions. There are echoes here of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (particularly as transformed by Francis Ford Coppola into Apocalypse Now) and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, yet Johnson’s achievement suggests that each generation gets the war-and the war novel-it deserves.Īt the center of Johnson’s epic sprawl is Colonel Francis Sands, the novel’s Captain Ahab, a character of profound, obsessive complexity and contradiction. Tree of Smoke is less concerned with any individual war than with the nature of war, and with the essence of war novels. Yet Denis Johnson has bigger whales to land in his longest and most ambitious work to date. ![]() ![]() Within the current political climate, the reader might expect a new novel about the war in Vietnam to provide a metaphor for Iraq. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |