Summary
Summary
Denis Johnson's The Laughing Monsters is a high-suspense tale of kaleidoscoping loyalties in the post-9/11 world that shows one of our great novelists at the top of his game.
Roland Nair calls himself Scandinavian but travels on a U.S. passport. After ten years' absence, he returns to Freetown, Sierra Leone, to reunite with his friend Michael Adriko. They once made a lot of money here during the country's civil war, and, curious to see whether good luck will strike twice in the same place, Nair has allowed himself to be drawn back to a region he considers hopeless.
Adriko is an African who styles himself a soldier of fortune and who claims to have served, at various times, the Ghanaian army, the Kuwaiti Emiri Guard, and the American Green Berets. He's probably broke now, but he remains, at thirty-six, as stirred by his own doubtful schemes as he was a decade ago.
Although Nair believes some kind of money-making plan lies at the back of it all, Adriko's stated reason for inviting his friend to Freetown is for Nair to meet Adriko's fiancée, a grad student from Colorado named Davidia. Together the three set out to visit Adriko's clan in the Uganda-Congo borderland--but each of these travelers is keeping secrets from the others. Their journey through a land abandoned by the future leads Nair, Adriko, and Davidia to meet themselves not in a new light, but rather in a new darkness.
Author Notes
Denis Johnson was born in Munich, Germany on July 1, 1949. He received a bachelor's degree and a master's degree from the University of Iowa. He published his first book of poetry, The Man Among the Seals, at the age of 19. However, addictions to alcohol and drugs derailed him and he was in a psychiatric ward at the age of 21. He was sober by the early 1980s.
Along with writing several volumes of poetry, Johnson wrote short stories for The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories. His novels included Angels, Jesus' Son, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, Already Dead, Nobody Move, Train Dreams, and The Laughing Monsters. He won the National Book Award in 2007 for Tree of Smoke. He also received the Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts, the Robert Frost Award, and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. He died of liver cancer on May 24, 2017 at the age of 67.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Guardian Review
A novelist who has secrecy as a key theme, with liars and spies recurring in his work, Denis Johnson remains a better-kept secret of American literature than his work deserves. It seems somehow typical that, when his novella Train Dreams became a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2012, the prize's board took one of their rare decisions to pick no winner. He is someone who leads more-famous authors to lament that he isn't more famous: there's a tribute from Jonathan Franzen on the cover of the latest. One reason that Johnson has been missed by the star-searching radar of literary publicity may be that he has failed to create a familiar brand. Train Dreams is historical fiction, but Fiskadoro post-nuclear futurism. The crime-noir novel Nobody Move and the short stories in Jesus' Son feature drifters in America, but in 2007, Tree of Smoke swapped the States for an espionage story set during the Vietnam war, with echoes - with its weary middle-aged danger-chasers fighting for an increasingly dubious cause - of the fiction of Robert Stone, John le Carre and Graham Greene. Tree of Smoke was Johnson's most substantial and successful fiction, so his admirers will forgive - and even applaud - the writer for coming, in The Laughing Monsters, as close as he ever has to repeating himself. Tree of Smoke consciously crossed some of Greene's footprints in south-east Asia in The Quiet American, and The Laughing Monsters, especially in its Sierra Leone sections, walks in the footsteps of The Heart of the Matter, which was inspired by Greene's experience of Freetown, where Johnson's novel begins and ends. The time is recent: Ebola hasn't yet reached this part of Africa - or Uganda and Congo, to where the story moves - but other alimentary diseases are rampant, as are Aids, hostage-taking terrorists and warlords, political corruption and environmental despoilment by global mining corporations. Where other novels might note whether a particular scene takes place by day or night, The Laughing Monsters specifies whether the electrical power supply is on or off (usually it's the latter). But these obstacles do not deter spies and missionaries from the US and Europe coming in the hope of converting local souls. Roland Nair is in Sierra Leone for reasons that are ambiguous for most of the novel and thus will remain so for the duration of this review. He claims to be a captain in the Danish army, although, as he is a rare Scandinavian with jet-black hair, we may suspect dye or, as with many characters' claims, a lie told as part of a cover story. He seems to be in Sierra Leone ("SL" to jaded regulars) on behalf of the NIIA, one of the less-known spying acronyms, which people Nair meets assume is something to do with the CIA but apparently stands for Nato Intelligence Interoperability Architecture, a post-9/11 initiative encouraging sharing of information between allied nations. Among NIIA's projects is the secret laying of a fibre-optic military communications system through seven west African states. In SL, Nair hooks up with an old associate from missions there and elsewhere: Michael Adriko, a fixer of ambiguous national affiliation but unchallengeable charisma. With Adriko in Freetown is Davidia St Clair, his latest in a chain of fiancees, who is, or says she is, the daughter of a senior US soldier. With a narrative conventionality disappointing from Johnson, Nair's attraction to St Clair increasingly threatens the sincerity of his unsent emails (there is rarely enough electricity to power web connections) to Tina, the colleague back at spook HQ who is supposed to be his girlfriend. This tiresome romantic triangle thankfully occupies little of the book. The compelling majority depicts Africa through dismal Greene-like details: the night insects rattling the bug-screen to which a candle has attracted them; a Chinese TV report about panda numbers flickering on a Ugandan hotel TV; a local fixer's car stinking of "spilt gas and dirty clothes". Although the protagonist is supposedly working for Nato, Britain is stingingly peripheral to events. Introduced to Spaulding, an English agent in a bar, Nair struggles to remember the structure of the UK intelligence services: "MI 4, 5, 6?" At this point, the dialogue wobbles as Spaulding says "Cheers, mate", and, challenged as being a representative of MI6, replies that he won't have anything to do with that mob because "they're all homosexuals". The novel is possibly more up-to-date in the way that, in common with Le Carre's A Most Wanted Man, it depicts spies as the new colonialists, carving up regions between them for advantage: the American, French and British spies keep hearing Russian spoken in bars and know that, while they can't see the Chinese, Beijing is a big player in Africa. The title neatly reflects differing cultural perspectives: an imposing range of hills, known to Africans as the Happy Mountains, were baptised the Laughing Monsters by a disillusioned missionary. While Nobody Move was the equal of most crime fiction, The Laughing Monsters is inferior to the very best spy novels. But this story of disguised lives should still help Johnson's progress out of the publishing shadows. Mark Lawson's The Deaths is published by Picador. 228pp, Harvill Secker, pounds 12.99 To order The Laughing Monsters for pounds 10.39 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. - Mark Lawson Caption: Captions: Shades of Greene . . . Freetown in Sierra Leone Tree of Smoke was [Denis Johnson]'s most substantial and successful fiction, so his admirers will forgive - and even applaud - the writer for coming, in The Laughing Monsters, as close as he ever has to repeating himself. Tree of Smoke consciously crossed some of [Graham Greene]'s footprints in south-east Asia in The Quiet American, and The Laughing Monsters, especially in its Sierra Leone sections, walks in the footsteps of The Heart of the Matter, which was inspired by Greene's experience of Freetown, where Johnson's novel begins and ends. Roland Nair is in Sierra Leone for reasons that are ambiguous for most of the novel and thus will remain so for the duration of this review. He claims to be a captain in the Danish army, although, as he is a rare Scandinavian with jet-black hair, we may suspect dye or, as with many characters' claims, a lie told as part of a cover story. He seems to be in Sierra Leone ("SL" to jaded regulars) on behalf of the NIIA, one of the less-known spying acronyms, which people Nair meets assume is something to do with the CIA but apparently stands for Nato Intelligence Interoperability Architecture, a post-9/11 initiative encouraging sharing of information between allied nations. Among NIIA's projects is the secret laying of a fibre-optic military communications system through seven west African states. Although the protagonist is supposedly working for Nato, Britain is stingingly peripheral to events. Introduced to Spaulding, an English agent in a bar, Nair struggles to remember the structure of the UK intelligence services: "MI 4, 5, 6?" At this point, the dialogue wobbles as Spaulding says "Cheers, mate", and, challenged as being a representative of MI6, replies that he won't have anything to do with that mob because "they're all homosexuals". - Mark Lawson.
New York Review of Books Review
on the plane I was reading this book. "Do you like Denis Johnson?" the woman beside me asked. "Yes," I said. "I've always felt he doesn't like his characters very much," she said. "O.K.," I said. She had gone to a writing program, had graduated from a writing program but no longer wrote, possibly because her characters' demand for respect and compassion became too onerous. She had become an acupuncturist and had a child. Now she and the child were coming back from Cabo San Lucas, where she had attended some sort of acupuncture conference, I think. That part was a little vague, but we didn't talk much after the child spilled juice all over us. The book, "The Laughing Monsters," was untouched however, immune to our discomfort - as were its characters, who were experiencing far more severe discomfort in an unpleasant and unenchanting Africa. The Laughing Monsters are some hills in the Democratic Republic of Congo, so named by a missionary before he was murdered, but they might just as well refer to the characters, the scammers and rogue spies Nair and Adriko. Nair (an inspired name, close as it is to "nadir," which as we know is the lowest point of, well, anything) is a black-haired Danish-American working for NATO Intelligence Interoperability Architecture, or N.I.I.A., and why not. Michael Adriko is a large, merry, lethal-looking African who is on his fifth fiancée, the beautiful if clueless Davidia, a Colorado girl who happens to be the daughter of the camp commander for the United States 10th Special Forces Group from which Michael is currently AWOL - or, as he prefers to say, "detached." Nair and Adriko have played here many years before, during the civil war, making some money, having some fun. Nair particularly relishes the mess that is Africa. The anarchy and madness. The things falling apart. He even likes the lobbies and rooms of the hotels with their distinctive chemical odor that says: "All that you fear, we have killed." OSTENSIBLY, NAIR HAS come in an N.I.I.A. capacity to check up on Adriko, who has been indiscreetly suggesting access to a crashed planeload of enriched uranium, but he's also here because his friend has summoned him - to attend the wedding to Davidia in his childhood village of New Water Mountain with the blessing of his people. The real plan, however, is for both men to become rich in the world that 9/11 has brought to full term. Excitement and opportunity now reside only in the arenas of information, be it false or true, regarding security and defense. "The world powers are dumping their coffers into an expanded version of the old Great Game," Nair informs Davidia. "The money's simply without limit, and plenty of it goes for snitching and spying. In that field, there's no recession." While Adriko crows: "Oh my goodness, Nair, you just tickle them in their terrorism bone, and they ejaculate all kinds of money." (The hundred grand that Nair picks up selling the location of the United States military's fiber optic cables is chump change.) Poor Davidia. She thinks she's going to have a lovely, unique wedding in the jungle to her man. But where, she wonders, is the jungle exactly? "The people cut it all down," Nair says. "They burned it to cook breakfast, mostly." En route to the fantasized nuptials in a stolen Land Cruiser, Adriko plows over a woman bringing a basin of harvested termites to market His unconcern disillusions Davidia somewhat, and it soon becomes obvious she's not cut out for further adventures after circumstances in the bloody board game that is Africa devolve into shooting, pillaging, imprisonment and interrogation. She's taken out of the picture by Daddy in a helicopter while the men find their way to New Water Mountain separately and quite the worse for wear. The village is not a happy one. The animals and most of the children are dead, the land and water toxic because of the extraction of gold and hydrocarbons. A grotesque "queen," La Dolce, rules and harangues the demented residents (who have "the puffy look of corpses floating in formalin") from a giant leafless tree. She's fat and laughing with "a buzz-cut Afro on her hippopotamus head, eyes leaping from the sockets and eyelids like birds' beaks closing over them - her mouth is tiny and round, but it opens to shocking hugeness, displaying many square white teeth." A couple of Seventh Day Adventists are present in this pit of gruesome, but even they've become fed up. One describes the scene as "the outworking of a spiritual travesty," but adds: "After a while, everything's funny." Not much more comes of this. The village is left to its doom, Adriko and Nair hitch a ride out with the Adventurists ("We've crawled from the wreck, we've walked away," Nair muses), and, after freshening up, begin to consider where to try next. Abidjan? Maybe Liberia. ("Much is possible there.") Uganda, Ghana, Senegal.... "There's always Cameroon." One doesn't feel warmly toward these buccaneers. They're comedians, irredeemable. This is the world after 9/11 (many lifetimes past, now) with its new equations, fluid alliances and casuistries. To the question here, "Are you any kind of believer?," the only answer can be no. Denis Johnson is closest in sensibility to the great Robert Stone, though he lacks that writer's command of plot and structure. Yet we don't read Johnson for methodology but for troubled effect and bright astonishments. A writer should write in such a way that nobody can be ignorant of the world and that nobody may say that he is innocent of what it is all about. Sartre says this, more or less, in "What Is Literature?" Johnson writes in just such a way. Life is ludicrous and full of cruel and selfish distractions. Honor is elusive and many find the copious ingestion of drugs necessary. Our ignorance is infinite and our sorrows fearful. We have made an unutterable waste of this world, and our passage through it is bitter and unheroic. Still, the horror can at times be illuminating, and it is necessary that the impossible be addressed. Here is the hapless murderer Bill Houston at the end of Johnson's first novel, "Angels," strapped down in the gas chamber, listening to the sound of his heart: "Boom. ... Boom! Was there ever anything as pretty as that one? Another coming ... boom! Beautiful! They just don't come any better than that. He was in the middle of taking the last breath of his life before he realized he was taking it. But it was all right. Boom! Unbelievable! And another coming? How many of these things do you mean to give away? He got right in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there. And then he saw that another one wasn't going to come." Writing, like old age and Wyoming, is not for sissies. JOHNSON WAS BORN in Munich, and his childhood was peripatetic. "Every move meant a chance to reinvent myself," he's said. His books take that same opportunity. This is his ninth novel. Others include the best-rendered post-nuke Florida Keys dystopia ever ("Fiskadoro"), the big and boldly retro Vietnam novel "Tree of Smoke" and the curiously hypnotic academic novel "The Name of the World." There's also the elegant and gloomy Americana novella "Train Dreams," and lesser merely impressive and enjoyable entertainments, sly riffs on our orphanhood, our muddled dreams, our historical tininess, our moral wobbliness. He's also written poetry, some plays, a single collection of short stories - the perversely divine "Jesus' Son" - and a solid collection of political and travel essays, "Seek." He probably plays the cello too. "The Laughing Monsters" is a minor work - there's no rocketing prose or conceptual jumping of fanes. Cheerfully nihilistic, it's a buddy book dependent for much of its situation on several of Johnson's early journalistic pieces about Liberia and Charles Taylor and the "atmosphere of happy horror" pervasive at the time. The whores and martinis and low-rent espionage seem no more than familiarly nostalgic, as does a time pre-Ebola. Africa is a hard land and it's getting even harder. In Johnson's earlier novel "The Stars at Noon," set in Nicaragua, a druggie prostitute is known as Mona Lisa because of her secretive beautiful smile that says: "It's over - why are we still here?" What a question! Prescient as ever, even as it all is over faster and faster and we still appear to be here. The critic Walter Benjamin speaks of the Klee painting "Angelus Novus," from which he derives the concept of "the angel of history." A stupendous storm propels the angel into the future to which his back is turned, the wreckage of the past growing and growing before him. Whereas we perceive merely a chain of events, the angel sees "one single catastrophe." The single catastrophe is what fuels the demands and mysteries of literature. The wreckage is what essential writers particularize, and Denis Johnson's interests have always been in wreckage, both individual and universal. If "Train Dreams" (a Pulitzer finalist) dealt with the dignified tragedy of a past American anonym, "The Laughing Monsters" addresses the vanishing present, a giddy trickle-down of global exploitation and hubris - the farcical exploits of cold dudes in a hard land. JOY WILLIAMS is the author of four novels, three collections of stories and a book of essays.
Library Journal Review
NATO intelligence officer Roland Nair is assigned to find Michael Adriko, who is AWOL from the U.S. Special Forces and probably involved in illegal activities in West Africa. Adriko, who in the past has worked with Nair on questionable moneymaking schemes, has invited Nair to his African village to attend his wedding to Davidia, a beautiful but naïve American. The three embark on a dangerous, calamity-filled trip through brutal and lawless areas of the continent. Scott Shepherd does an excellent job reading the book, flawlessly alternating between American and African accents and bringing out the horror of an exploited African population. Verdict The Laughing Monsters, reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, is recommended for all libraries.-Ilka Gordon, Beachwood, OH © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.