But that is not easy either because oh what a surface story it is-amazingly poetical, with never a lazy sentence, with dialogue that crackles, and characters who will stick in your memory. And just as literature students debate endlessly the meaning of Ahab's obsessions and Ishmael's salvation, so too will future generations have the pleasure of deciphering Johnson's challenge: what are we to make of his tree of smoke, his birth-canal tunnels, his Catholic priests of lost faith, his monks of lost purpose, his missionaries crushed by Calvinism, his psy-op warriors on the edge where "reality becomes the dream" and who become the final "compensator"? These are not easy threads to link into a unified vision, but the Johnson is throwing down a big challenge to his reader to pay attention to these underlying concerns and not merely ride the more surface story. Not since Moby Dick have I encountered a novel that will engage you on a gut-wrenching visceral level of realism and then slide you gently into a meditation of metaphysical matters, and then bam! back into realism.
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