I finished Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke a few months ago; he rushed me to a conclusion that tidied the plot strands but left one bulbous character knot: the Colonel. Johnson had created a mythic figure, one whose power seemed to defy the rather conventional death that common sense dictated to surviving characters. Where in the jungles of Southeast Asia was he? And what exactly was he conspiring to do? Johnson’s latest novel, The Laughing Monsters, deals with baser stuff, at least as far as character is concerned; but in Michael Adriko Johnson manages to present venal vision aggrandized. We see him through the eyes of his fellow rogue Nair, a spy and adventurer who has a history with Michael. The African, of uncertain political allegiance and violent career, is on his way to his jungle home to wed a beautiful African American woman. In the course of this abortive wedding odyssey, Michael offers Nair a chance to make huge sums of money, perhaps by brokering a deal that involves uranium, but certainly by exploiting the need for intelligence information by interested parties. The plot twists, the rogues suffer and Nair betrays his NATO masters. Michael however seems to ride above this in his very audacity; he is reckless, that is he does not reckon as normal souls do. His over-reaching finds its source in greed; his courage in the limits of his conscience. But his charisma, woeful word, leaves us with the same problem posed by the colonel: what do these fictions mean to us? What do they point to beyond their affront to the reader’s sheltered life?
I’d venture an answer, to adapt Wordsworth: that we are more than we seem. Johnson’s Train Dreams confronts one with this answer in a far more basic way. The novella offers us Robert Grainier, an orphan, who grows to maturity early in the last century in the far North West. A day laborer, a lumberjack, a hauler, and a subsistence farmer, he has summer work in the deep woods that takes him from his cabin home in the Moyea Valley of Idaho where his wife and daughter wait for him. Upon his return he finds that a forest fire has taken his wife and child, his cabin, and the encircling woods.
“He saw no sign of their Bible either. If the Lord had failed to protect even the book of his own Word, this proved to Grainier that here had come a fire stronger than God.” Isolated in the ruined land, Robert feels the spirit of his wife and child. “As long as he saw impossible things in this place, and liked them, he might as well be in the habit of talking to himself, too.” Into that dialogue with himself intrudes a pup, from the litter of a wolf, Grainier believes. He addresses the animal: “You’re not growing in the direction of your own nature, which is to howl when the others do . . . But often thereafter, when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth . . . and after an evening’s program with his choir of British Columbian wolves he felt warm and buoyant.”
Grainier, brought down by the fire to ashes, bereft of family, lonely on a mountain, howls at the moon, one would daresay, in accordance with his nature. Johnson’s “choir of British Columbian wolves” comes as a remarkable and ironic comment. The absurdity of the scene he has created rounds against its artful rightness. Grainier is more than he seems.
As he lives his life out, in the occasional company of Kootenai Bob, an oracular Indian at ease in the spirit world, he discovers another kind of knowledge. In a scene at once grotesque and symbolic, Grainier carries a wounded man, Peterson, to the nearest doctor. Peterson and Grainier converse in an increasingly absurd and more worrying terms: his dog has shot him, so Peterson affirms to the incredulous Grainier. The confrontation, born out of a warning by Bob, arises from his declaration that the dog “had been confabulating with the wolf-girl person. A creature is what you call her, if ever she was created. But there are some creatures on this earth that God didn’t create.”
In that preternatural night, Grainier drives in fear, unable to decipher Peterson’s warning or his dog’s malevolence. Yet the whole of this intrusion of spirit world into the material is exorcised by sacred economics: “when the election season came, the demons of the silver standard and the railroad land snatch took their attention, and the mysteries in the hills around the Moyea Valley were forgotten for a while.”
In a penultimate scene, almost a displaced climax, Grainier is again beset by the “mysteries in the hills around the Moyea Valley.” The disruption of time and place is marked by increasingly lyrical prose, and a form of magical realism, as the terror of the wolf girl myth devolves to a replaying of Grainier’s domestic tragedy. In the company of a howling pack, the wolf girl lies down in front of Grainier’s cabin: he is startled in recognition.
The child’s eyes sparked greenly in the lamplight like those of any wolf. Her face was that of a wolf, but hairless.
“Kate?” he said. “It is you?” But it was.
Nothing about her told him that. He simply knew it. This was his daughter.'
This reunion is occasioned, as the title indicates, by Train Dreams, the sound of the railway in the valley below. The whistle incites the wolves. The unambiguously modern and real provokes an encounter primordial and spiritual.
In a scene that really has no right to work, Johnson ends the novel with a freak show, a carnival affair that Grainier attends later in his life. The attraction is a “wolf boy” who draws the sated scorn of an unimpressed crowd until he opens his mouth to howl.
“He laid his head back until his scalp contracted his spine, that far back, and opened his throat, and a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor, and it gathered into a roar that sucked at the hearing itself, and coalesced into a voice that penetrated into the sinuses and finally in the very minds of those hearing it, taking itself higher and higher, more and more awful and beautiful, the originating ideal for all such sound ever made, of the foghorn and the ship’s horn, the locomotive’s lonesome whistle, of opera singing and the music of flutes and the continuous moaning music of bagpipes. And suddenly it all went black. And that time was gone forever.”
A bravura sentence concluded by a riddling pronouncement. But the import is clear enough: Grainier has found something in life through nature, something original, autochthonous if I may, and that mediation tells us much about Johnson’s visio—as does the beauty of his prose. This is no Wordsworthian Prelude but William might not be surprised; he might assert that nature did not betray, rather illuminated.
