The Laughing Monsters” drops us onto the steamy airport tarmac of Freetown, Sierra Leone, then takes us on a no-seat-belts ride into the maelstrom of violence and corruption that personifies today’s West Africa.
The title of Denis Johnson’s latest novel refers to the Congo’s Happy Mountains, which a 19th century missionary, “in frustration and disgust,” nicknamed the Laughing Monsters. But the title also is a nod to the novel’s antiheroes, Roland Nair and Michael Adriko, who derive endless joy from their nonstop nefarious behavior no matter the lives lost or governments betrayed.
The novel begins with Nair, a NATO operative, arriving in Freetown. He’s there to meet his old friend Adriko and his fiancée, Davidia St. Claire. They’ve made a plan to travel together to Adriko’s village in the Uganda-Congo borderland.
But secrets strafe every moment of their journey. “More will be revealed” and “I’ll fill you in eventually” are their road trip’s anthems. Who they really are is a mystery that runs to the heart of this novel. No one’s motives are clear, and neither Adriko nor Nair really knows what the other is scheming. Adriko’s pretense for visiting the Happy Mountains is really a cover for a scam he’s hatched to sell bogus enriched uranium to Mossad. Nair’s working a deal to sell information on the location of U.S. military fiber-optic cables in a seven West African countries. He may also be under a NATO directive to spy on Adriko, who may or may not be AWOL from the U.S. Army.
“The Laughing Monsters” also is about the evolution of spycraft since 2001 and the bottomless pits of money world governments are spending to learn each other’s secrets. Just as Halliburton-like contractors are making profits off conflicts around the world, the fortune hunters in “The Laughing Monsters” take advantage of any money-making opportunities that come their way. For Adriko and Nair, legalities are meaningless.
“We talk about how the world has changed since the Twin Towers went down. I think you could easily say the part that’s changed the most is the world of intelligence, security, and defense,” Nair tells St. Claire. “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.”
All this intrigue seems custom-made for a full-speed-ahead spy thriller, but the plot bogs down when Johnson inserts Nair’s ridiculous school-boy crush on St. Claire. It’s a tiresome sub-plot surrounding a woman who spends the entire novel dependent on the men in her life. She’s an Army brat who abandons her Ph.D. studies to follow Adriko to Africa. Nair bores us with his endless rhapsodizing about her beauty, then confounds us when he spends his free time with prostitutes or emailing his girlfriend in Amsterdam.
Buddy films, both dramas and comedies, wax on about male-bonding rituals. “The Laughing Monsters” is, indeed, a buddy book. Adriko and Nair revel in their dangerous schemes and tackling the big con. Because of past adventures — intelligence work in Afghanistan and an earlier scheme involving diamonds — and the promise of future cons, Adriko and Nair really only have eyes for each other. It’s a telling detail that St. Claire is Adriko’s fifth fiancée. When she asks Nair whether he’s just a “cheap adventurer,” he asks, “Why do you call it cheap? Adventure is glorious. I don’t understand why people put it down.” For him and Adriko, it’s a life path.
These buddies share the spotlight with Africa, another of the novel’s main characters. Johnson vibrantly illustrates the poverty, sickness and hopelessness of Africa’s indigent population. Monumental environmental problems, due to the pillaging of natural resources by governments and entrepreneurs, add another grim layer of darkness to Johnson’s story.
Comparisons inevitably will be made to the Africa-set espionage novels of Graham Greene and John le Carré, but Johnson doesn’t need the comparisons. In “Tree of Smoke,” he told another brilliantly messy tale of intelligence operations. He tells his stories in his own way, adjusting the genre’s formula to suit his own needs.
Who needs comparisons when you can be your own spymaster.
Carol Memmott is a Virginia-based freelance writer and adjunct professor at American University.
“The Laughing Monsters”
By Denis Johnson, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 228 pages, $25