The American writer Denis Johnson is best known for 1992’s Jesus’ Son, a book of linked tales of midwestern addicts drawn from the author’s fast youth and written (legend has it) to pay a tax bill. A cult figure, his fiction alternates in focus between backwoods masculinity in the style of his former teacher Raymond Carver and knotty geopolitical thrillers à la Don DeLillo. In the latter mode he can be exhilarating as well as bewildering: Geoff Dyer suggested that the name of the CIA-man hero in Johnson’s Vietnam epic Tree of Smoke (2007), Skip, “dares the reader to do just that”.
The Laughing Monsters is more Tree of Smoke than Jesus’ Son. The narrator, Nair, is a Swiss-educated, Dutch-based Danish-American sent by Nato to Sierra Leone to spy on Michael Adriko, an Israeli-trained Ugandan mercenary gone awol while serving with the US army in the Democratic Republic of Congo after spells in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Michael has hatched a retirement plan that involves uranium and Mossad, which is what’s worrying Nair’s bosses. They don’t know, or don’t care, that Nair and Michael are old buddies: Michael offers him a cut with the promise of 12-year-old girls on a coastal hideaway, “a new one every night”. Nair, for his part, has a USB stick full of American state secrets, a pension scheme of his own.
Apparently Johnson spent a month in Uganda in search of “local colour”. What did he find? Nair calls “Africa” a “land of rumours” that “wipes its mess with schedules” and where “reasonable arguments were just mumbo jumbo”. He watches a news report about a child-eating pig and sees roadside baboons eyeing an overturned car “sprouting limbs and dripping with blood”. Freetown is “a multitude of shadows and muddy rags trudging God knows where, hunched forward over their empty bellies”. “I love the mess,” says Nair. “Anarchy. Madness. Things falling apart.” I doubt Chinua Achebe would have approved.
Nair’s first-person narration addresses his girlfriend, Tina, whose only act in the book is to send him a cameraphone picture of her breasts. Soon Nair can’t remember if he’s writing to her or to Michael’s girlfriend, whose own breasts are “very high, very round”, and who moves her hips in a way that’s “very African, very female”. For Nair, who lost contact with his mother when he was eight, women are disposable as well as interchangeable. On his first night in Freetown he pays a 15-year-old for sex. Another escort on another night is “drunk, also in some way drugged, and she passed out when we were done – perhaps before we were done, and I simply didn’t notice”.
Johnson has described The Laughing Monsters as a “spy story with what we might ca=ll serious intentions”, but I don’t think he particularly cares about hanging Nair out to dry as a rapist and a racist. For one, Johnson has always been drawn to antiheroes; I suspect instead that he wants the narrator’s consummate ugliness to sharpen the edge to some of the other things Nair has to tell us.
“The world has changed since the twin towers went down,” he says, in one of several speeches parachuted in among the twists and turns and double-crossings. “The world powers are dumping their coffers into an expanded version of the old Great Game. The money’s simply without limit, and plenty of it goes for snitching and spying. In that field, there’s no recession.”
The cast’s relentlessly cosmopolitan background often seems comical. It probably isn’t meant to be. Who pays for Nair? You do.
The Laughing Monsters is published by Harvill Secker (£12.99). Click here to buy it for £10.39
