In his ninth novel, The Laughing Monsters, the American writer Denis Johnson has attempted to give us a literary spy thriller just as confused and, at times, confusing as the African countries it stumbles through.
It is a novel that begins and ends in not quite present day Freetown, Sierra Leone. We know it is not present day because there’s no mention of Ebola, the spectre of which hangs over the book like a diabolical footnote: You think this is bad? This is Africa. Things can always get worse.
Denis Johnson is a great poet of things getting worse.
He has a particular way of making you stop and wonder at the world – a command of the small, stinging detail – often just as one of his characters is having the rug pulled out from under their feet. From the soulfully deranged drifters and alcoholics in his classic collection of short stories, Jesus' Son (1992), to the lonely, seeping strangeness of his hermit in his Pulitzer Prize-nominated masterpiece, Train Dreams (2012), or the CIA and US military officers gone amok in the National Book Award-winning Vietnam novel, Tree of Smoke (2007), his characters either start a little crazy or end up a little crazy, and the devil, as they say, is always in Johnson's details.
For example, when a Ugandan village is slaughtered by warlords, Johnson chillingly writes: "The whole village, it seemed, was crying out, some of them screeching like birds, some bawling, some moaning low. Every child sounded like every other child." It's like Raymond Carver crafting a Graham Greene novel. Which is to say, one doesn't come to The Laughing Monsters looking for good guys or bad guys. They're all pretty much bad guys. As for purpose, our protagonist Roland Nair doesn't seem to have a good one beyond "not going back to that boring existence". He admits: "I've come back because I love the mess. Anarchy. Madness. Things falling apart."
Nair is half Danish, half American, all nihilist. He has returned to Africa from his current home in Amsterdam in order to double-cross everyone – basically to double-cross himself right out of his boring Dutch existence.
Ostensibly, he is working for the something called the NIIA (Nato Intelligence Interoperability Architecture). The NIIA has tasked him with getting close to Michael Adriko, an old Ugandan friend of Nair’s. Nair doesn’t exactly know why the NIIA want him to report on Adriko, who has been working for the US military in various unsavory capacities. Nair and Adriko share a history of chaos and combat. They haven’t seen each other in more than 10 years, though their bond feels both fraught and deep. It becomes clear that Adriko is the only person on Earth Nair loves, which may or may not be the reason he’s prepared to betray him. (That Nair is concurrently involved in a plan to betray the US and Nato should also be noted.)
Adriko is the star of the novel. He’s a force of nature, physically imposing and charismatic. He moves through the world like a hero in a myth and Nair is both in awe of and exasperated by him. Adriko, it turns out, has run off from a US special forces unit hunting the Lord’s Resistance Army in the Eastern Congo. He’s AWOL. More than that, he’s taken with him the African-American daughter of his commanding officer, a US colonel. Adriko plans to take her back to the Ugandan village where he was born in order to marry her.
But first things first: Adriko has also concocted a scam involving the hiring of mercenaries to rob Mossad agents of US$1 million while pretending to sell enriched uranium. Needless to say, things do not go as planned. Or, as Nair explains: “Michael doesn’t draw up plans. He weaves tales.”
This tale eventually descends into a kind of fever dream. Nair and Adriko, both increasingly unspooled, get lost in the Congo, get captured, nearly killed and recaptured by various forces. The hide-and-seek game of truth and lies continues until the final pages of the novel, which Nair, in narration, advises us not to believe entirely. What happened? Anything could have happened.
As Adriko tells Nair: “Reality is an impression, a belief. Any magician knows this.” Or any good novelist – and Denis Johnson, even in a relatively minor work like this, once again proves himself to be a great one.
The book is available on Amazon.
Tod Wodicka lives in Berlin and Moscow. His second novel, The Household Spirit, will be published by Random House in June.