64 pages • 2-hour read
The Man Made of Smoke
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, child death, child abuse, physical abuse, and cursing.
The Ordinary Face of Evil
In an early section of the novel, Fleming, the police officer investigating John’s disappearance, asks Dan how he manages to study serial killers and bring himself “to talk to them like they’re human beings” (30). Dan responds that he treats his patients as humans because “there’s no such thing as monsters” (31). In asserting the humanity of his patients, Dan busts the myth that people who commit the worst crimes are otherworldly or fringe elements. Dan’s comment is also a reference to real-world vocabulary, like “monsters” and “animals,” often used to describe people responsible for heinous crimes. However, the truth is that unspeakable evil is committed by regular, ordinary people and in everyday spaces and situations. For instance, the Pied Piper, the sadistic killer at the center of the novel, is revealed to be unremarkable looking and just another average person. By highlighting the ordinariness of evil and the violence that goes on in everyday spaces, the novel suggests that these spaces can’t be presumed safe for the vulnerable.
The greatest example of the juxtaposition of extraordinary evil and ordinary spaces is the service station. When the Pied Piper killer walks in through the arcade in broad daylight, people hardly notice him or the boy next to him, even though Dan’s description makes it clear that James looks visibly imperiled, streaked with dirt, and dressed in oversized clothing. While it’s easy to assume that killers like the Pied Piper operate only off the grid, the service station shows that they exist within the real world. Ironically, Michael Johnson, the teenager behind the counter of a shop, does notice James, but only because “he’s keeping an eye on a kid he suspects of being a potential shoplifter” (2). In another twist of bleak irony, Johnson is described as being “obsessed with true crime […] reading lurid accounts of serial killers” (2). Perhaps it’s because Johnson associates luridness with such crimes that he fails to detect the crime unfolding in front of him, in the humdrum, mundane world of the arcade.
Extending the theme, the novel also shows how domestic spaces are often the sites of violence. As an example, the narrative suggests that Aspinall was abusive toward Abigail and that Aspinall himself was abused by his father in their island home. Through these instances, the novel lays bare the notion that all homes are sanctuaries. Recognizing that evil wears a human face and takes place in ordinary settings is a key step to preventing and stopping crime. For instance, if more adults had paid attention to the Pied Piper’s camper van, they could have noticed something odd about it. As it happened, they turned away from the grimy van, dismissing it for another ramshackle vehicle. Dan, free yet from grown-up presumptions, notices that the van juxtaposes the ordinary and the surreal: Children’s handprints smudge its bottom, and its side windows are papered over, eerie and opaque.
The Complex Silence Between Fathers and Sons
Turning the lens on the Dan-John relationship, the novel examines how silence complicates the bond between fathers and sons, especially after difficult and traumatic events. Though Dan and John are similar in many ways and share a deep love, they feel cut off from each other, locked in their bubbles of silence. An example of these isolating bubbles are the sealed-off spaces that Dan and John occupied in the same house during Dan’s adolescent years. Dan recalls being alone in his room and listening to John work his punching bag for hours at a stretch, the “thuds of the punchbag echoing through the house” (116). Once, Dan could hear John’s footsteps approach his room and wanted to invite John in for a chat so that “the two of [them] could talk in a way that the words actually met in the middle rather than drifting past or drowning each other out” (141), but he never acted on the impulse. The motifs of silence and isolation also mark the novel’s flashback sections, in which John withholds information from Dan over phone calls and Dan is unable to get through to John. By emphasizing the build-up of their mutual silence, the novel sets up Dan and John for a cathartic breakthrough.
Silence in the father-son bond also plays out as misunderstandings since true intentions are never clarified. For instance, when Dan made a joke that his father reads crime novels to feel like a hero, John felt that the comment was a dig at his lack of heroism in real life. However, John didn’t express his hurt feelings to Dan. For his part, Dan refused to explain that he was just joking, even though he knew that John was taken aback by his words. As this example shows, the inexpressiveness between fathers and sons is also informed by the pressures of performative masculinity. John couldn’t tell Dan that he was hurt because that would mean admitting vulnerability; Dan refused to show his father that he was sensitive to his feelings. In addition, since John felt like a failure as a man, in the context of John’s feelings of smallness, every challenge by Dan seemed like a put-down. Thus, the social expectation that men remain stoic and proud further worsens the miscommunications between fathers and sons.
Dan’s relationship with John follows an archetypal trajectory: He loves his father yet needs to diminish him to prove his individuality. Thus, even though Dan admires John’s compassion and investigative skills, he also undermines him by typecasting him as a frustrated, angry man who is more inclined to “brute force” rather than technique and reasoning. For Dan, John’s files of seemingly unsolved cases, his crime novels, and his punching bag become symbols of John’s inability to crack the code of life. The narrative bridges this seemingly impassable distance through the metaphor of making father and son “talk” to each other. John communicates with Dan through a breadcrumb trail of clues, while Dan enters his father’s mind to join the dots, entering into an active dialogue with his version of John. This imaginary dialogue is the first step in healing the silence between father and son. The more Dan “talks” to John, the more he begins to see him as a person, rather than an archetypal figure. Thus, only when Dan and John talk to each other can they experience a cathartic moment, saving each other at the novel’s end.
Survivor’s Guilt and the Search for Redemption
One question that the novel raises is how to move forward after having failed a person in the most important ways. Left with survivor’s guilt, characters in the novel look for redemption in order to justify their existence, but the quest can sometimes lead them into bleak places, with redemption turning into revenge. The drive for redemption also plays out in various, unexpected ways in the lives of characters: Dan became a forensic psychiatrist or criminal profiler so that he can use his knowledge to save lives, while John tries to solve cold cases so that he can provide solace for the dead. Haunted by the apparition of the boy they couldn’t rescue, Dan and John seek absolution through pursuing justice for others.
The desire for redemption is a strong propellant for these characters, as they live in a fog of guilt and self-punishment. Dan notes that he read The Man Made of Smoke over and over again as a teenager so that he could form a clear image of the victimized children, “which was also a way of punishing [him]self for what [he] had failed to do” (140). Dan becomes so consumed by his punishing recreations of the boys that they seem more real to him than his actual classmates in school. Guilt, thus, creates an alternate world for Dan. John also lives with persistent guilt. After discovering the present-day murders, the accusing voices in his head amplify, telling him, “You fucked up again, didn’t you?” (288). For John, these voices go even further back than the encounter with the Pied Piper. He has always felt guilty of lapsing in all his roles, of “a life spent slipping, falling and failing” (289). To escape this guilt, John sometimes endangers himself, such as when he agrees to meet the man who claims to be Michael Johnson, knowing well that the man could be the killer. Thus, the search for redemption can be self-destructive at times.
In Aspinall’s case, the quest turns unhinged and violent. Guilty that he failed James, Aspinall would have sought redemption by pursuing the Pied Piper, except the killer had already died a miserable death. Left with a directionless search, Aspinall decides to place blame on those who didn’t “see” James, punishing them for their supposedly willful blindness by making them witness torture and murder. Through Aspinall’s example, the narrative shows how the search for redemption is meaningful only when informed by self-awareness and accepting the irreversibility of the past. Most importantly, the journey to redemption is as internal as it is external: One must be able to forgive oneself to be truly redeemed, as Dan’s character arc indicates. At the beginning of the novel, Dan notes that in his practice, he has told affected people not to blame themselves countless times, but “it was easy to offer advice from the outside” (42). Dan has never stopped blaming himself for failing James. However, at the novel’s end, Dan lets go of this blame, recognizing that what happened to James and the other boys was never his fault. In this moment of acceptance and forgiveness, Dan’s search for redemption is realized.
Unlock every key theme and why it matters
Get in-depth breakdowns of the book’s main ideas and how they connect and evolve.
- Explore how themes develop throughout the text
- Connect themes to characters, events, and symbols
- Support essays and discussions with thematic evidence