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book review

Denis Johnson’s story is not only one of espionage, but one of Western hubris as well.

Back in the fall of 2013, Denis Johnson told the Yale Review that he was writing "a spy story with what we might call serious intentions, on the order of Graham Greene." And then he joked: "I'm not trying to be Graham Greene. I think I actually am Graham Greene."

That story is The Laughing Monsters, Johnson's eleventh book of fiction, and the influences aren't limited to a single author, though The Heart of the Matter, A Burnt-Out Case and The Quiet American offer useful reference points. The novel is shaped by the duplicitous, disorienting voyage of Roland Nair, a U.S.-Danish citizen, spy-for-hire and professional boozehound, from Sierra Leone, through Uganda, to the end of the serpent's tail in deepest Congo – the setting, roughly, for Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. (Intentionally or not, Johnson's jibe echoes another usurper of Conrad's novella, Francis Ford Coppola, who claimed of Apocalypse Now: "My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam.")

So, some confluences. But what does it mean to return such a story to, as Conrad once put it, that "place of darkness"? Over the past generation or two, Africa has taken on new resonances in the West, yet only the specifics of the colonial era's racialized paranoia have changed: from Ebola to base-camps for international terrorism, an entire continent's alleged darkness now threatens to seep into the so-called first world. In his famed takedown of Conrad, Chinua Achebe claims that in the imperialist view, "tragedy begins when things leave their accustomed place;" as such, the going narrative on Africa has become one of containment.

There's an attendant claustrophobia to this new novel of Denis Johnson's, a writer as masterful at detailing the bizarre post-apocalyptic realms of Fiskadoro as ruddering a 700-page Vietnam epic, the National Book Award-winning Tree of Smoke, through a huge cast of characters and great swaths of history, myth and landscape. His books have often leant toward the hardboiled – from the radio jock resetting his life as a P.I. in Resuscitation of a Hanged Man to the pulpy noir of Nobody Move – and The Laughing Monsters showcases his prototypically "muscular" and "lean" (so, sinewy?) language, while the plot is full of plots.

Nair, provisionally employed by an espionage wing of NATO, has returned to Sierra Leone after years away to reunite with (and scope out) his former associate Michael Adriko, who arrives with a scheme and a woman, Davidia. As the threesome make their way from west Africa down south and back up again, and Adriko repeatedly assures Nair that "more will be revealed," our antihero reveals a few plans of his own, which include hawking NATO secrets to a Mossad affiliate and wooing Davidia away from his old pal. Things crackle along through several misadventures, including an illusory hunt for WMD-ready uranium, with Johnson's sentences often channelling Graham Greene at his most incisive: "As he expressed these ideas he followed them with his eyes, watching them gallop away to the place where they made sense."

Achebe criticized Conrad's depiction of Africa as "as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest." But The Laughing Monsters offers little grace, and the savagery is mostly Nair's: he drinks, he discards prostitutes in the streets, he wheels and deals and looks out, exclusively, for Number One, while his girlfriend, Tina, sits on the (figurative) live grenade he's left her in Amsterdam – "waiting the poisonous fallout from [his] ruin."

Heart of Darkness was also an expressionistic text, which plumbed Africa's supposed barbarity as an embodiment of its European characters' tormented souls, while the international intrigue of Graham Greene's novels offered a similar conduit for crises of faith. The ultimate arbiter in Greene's fictional universe was God, and The Laughing Monsters transposes that authority to more secular powers-that-be. Tellingly, these addresses adopt the direct address of prayer. "You sent me into this mess but told me nothing relevant," Nair rails in an imaginary missive to NATO. "If there's something I know and you don't, anything at all – you can wait for it at the bottom of Hell."

But there's a shift toward the end of the novel, which reunites Nair with Adriko in his friend's home village, where a deranged queen lords Kurtz-like over all from the treetops; Davidia has left them. Nair debases himself by turning on Adriko, first with some racially charged language ("I know every word for you"), and then physically, which results in Nair's face in the mud and a knife plunged into the ground beside his ear. The narration in this final section is framed as a confession from Nair to Tina and Davidia, albeit one of shame, without the hope of redemption or salvation.

Yet Nair offers atonement in his declarations to the women he has loved and loves: "Someday I'll put it all down in words and send it to you," he writes. "I don't know what a thorough confession will do for you, or what it might do to ease this combination of dread and anger working at my insides… For whatever it's worth, someday – the story from beginning to end." And so we have the book in our hands: this testimonial of Western hubris and deceit, profiteering and naivety, yet less a crisis of selfhood than a tale of self-preservation.

Pasha Malla is the author of four books.

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