BookBrowse Reviews The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson

BookBrowse:

The Laughing Monsters is a high-suspense tale of kaleidoscoping loyalties in the post-9/11 world.

It's all how you look at it. The Congolese locals refer to a set of hills in their central African countryside as the Happy Mountains, but the same landscape creeped out an early missionary named James Hannington, the first Anglican bishop of East Africa, who promptly labeled them the Laughing Monsters.

This issue of differing perspectives surfaces again and again in Denis Johnson's latest, an atmospheric novel that visits quite a few countries in Africa. And as Roland Nair, a half-Danish, half-American NATO spy operative who just landed in Sierra Leone knows, perspectives do matter when you're trying to operate undercover in a continent where the rules of the game might change on a whim. At its most basic, The Laughing Monsters feels like a buddy movie with Nair and his friend, Ugandan native, Michael Adriko, connecting in Sierra Leone and going off on what might or might not be a mission of importance. (Adriko and Nair have shared a history of partnership on dubious schemes yet it's never quite clear how they met in the first place). This time around, there's talk of uranium changing hands and Nair helping set up a secret fiber-optic network across parts of the countryside. Nair's intentions are vague: "We crunch numbers for corporate entities interested in partnering on large projects with the public sector. In the EU, that is. We're not quite global. It's dull stuff. But I get around quite a bit."

And get around, he does. Nair and Adriko travel through Sierra Leone and into Uganda and parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Also traveling with them is Adriko's fiancee, Davidia St. Claire, whom Adriko insists he will marry after traveling to his native village in the Happy Mountains. Complicating matters is the fact that Nair seems to have fallen for Davidia as well.

Fans of Denis Johnson (I count myself among them) will find much to love in The Laughing Monsters. His powerful, adrenaline-fueled writing is in full force and he brings Africa alive in these pages: "In an instant the day ended, night came down, and the many voices around us, for the space of ten seconds, went quiet. A few hundred meters away the buildings began, but not a single light shone from the powerless city, and the outcry coming from the void wasn't so much from horns and engines, but rather more from humans and their despairing animals. Meanwhile, waiters went from table to table lighting tapers in tall glass chimneys." Despite the crisp prose however, the plot doesn't coalesce into a smooth whole. You get the feeling that Johnson is too distracted by his own caper to tie it all together effectively. "Reality is an impression, a belief," Johnson writes. Too often here, that statement feels like an excuse to be left off the hook. Nair's and Adriko's adventures might have secret ulterior motives, but it would have been nice for the reader to be privy to at least some of them. The whole doesn't add up to something larger than the sum of its parts. Of course, with a writer like Denis Johnson, even these discrete pieces can make for great reading.

Despite this drawback, snatches of inspired writing and Johnson's subtle jabs at a new kind of post-colonial landscape make The Laughing Monsters a worthy addition to an already impressive resume. What are you here for, an African local asks Nair, gold or hydrocarbons? As this novel expertly shows, in the post 9-11 times, the continent has only managed to trade one kind of evil for another. Africa might have shaken off decades of colonial rule, but the multinationals, in bed with the superpowers, are the new imperialists in town. Pebbles and powders are for bit players. For the truly well-placed, there's always "diverted aid, siphoned oil revenue, that kind of thing." The end goal, Nair reminds the reader, is always money.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in January 2015, and has been updated for the November 2015 edition. Click here to go to this issue.