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The Laughing Monsters

Denis Johnson

By Robert Smith
Published: Nov 18, 2014
Category: Fiction

Guest Butler Robert Smith is a semi-retired music-business executive, a part-time painter and resident of Los Angeles who still cherishes his east coast roots and proclivities. He is an occasional contributor to Malibu Magazine, covering documentary films and photography. His most recent piece, on Bill Burke’s three books of post-Vietnam War photographs of Cambodia, Laos and Thailand, has a deep connection to Denis Johnson’s “Tree of Smoke.”

“The Laughing Monsters,” just 220 pages, is one of the fall’s “big” books. I’m a huge fan of Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, but I’ve read none of his other novels. Robert Smith? He’s read ‘em all. And knows all.

—————
Well we know where we’re goin’
But we don’t know where we’ve been
And we know what we’re knowin’
But we can’t say what we’ve seen
And we’re not little children
And we know what we want
And the future is certain
Give us time to work it out
– “Road to Nowhere,” David Byrne

“The Laughing Monsters” isn’t so much a spy novel as it is a road movie, a screwball comedy starring two guys who are not spies in the classic sense — morally, ethically or politically. They’re career opportunists whose trade happens to be spycraft.

So many of Denis Johnson’s characters are travelers from the dark side. They wander in the landscape of dreams; driven by a cracked commitment to survive, they piece together fragments of what’s gone on before and try to get the hell out of town intact. They’re not so much looking for answers — that’s too profound — as they are desperately trying to get through it alive and, in “The Laughing Monsters,” richer too.

The era of Weapons of Mass Destruction encouraged the growth of privatized military services, including the very lucrative espionage industry. With plenty of money to spend and bad guys hiding under every rug woven in the Middle East, the increasingly out of touch American agencies threw money around like crazy. In the days following 9/11, there was a desperate need for stuff.

Roland Nair is a Scandinavian with an American passport, a shady past, and a current relationship with NATO. Michael Adriko is an African of probably Congolese birth and a former dark-web ally of Nair’s. The seductive and oblivious fiancé of Adriko, Davidia St Claire, is an escapee from a Colorado military base, where her father was the camp commander of the US Tenth Special Forces Group. Adriko swept her off her feet and is taking her back, we think, to marry in his family’s village on the Uganda-Congo border.

Maybe. It’s all a big, dark, maybe.

Adriko is also engaged in a life-threatening, enriched-uranium transaction/scam, which needs the help of a buddy. Nair, his dear old friend and trusted companion, is traveling on behalf of NATO, ostensibly to keep tabs on Adriko. Of course, Nair too has a side racket — he’s selling secrets: fiber optic cable maps, NATO intelligence safe house locations — to a guy named Hamid. And that stuff is real.

Nair shakes down Hamid for much more money, payable four weeks hence, one-time. one-place. We now have a double-plot with spies, liars, killers, and shadowy characters keeping tabs on all sides — and the clock ticking. It’s a murky journey from Freetown to Congo, dangerous, even terrifying. And that’s a perfect milieu for Johnson: everything is dark, forbidding, unclear, morally compromised, tense, action-packed, poetic and profound. For a writer who has been sober for decades, Johnson soaks everything in drugs and alcohol with a steamy precision. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

There is an insanely dangerous drive from Kampala, Uganda, toward the border. In a bloody scene reminiscent of Godard’s “Weekend,” we read:

We slowed down only for the accidents, getting on the margin to steer around a small wreck, later another, and then we met a big one that stopped traffic both ways…. Ours was the first vehicle to come along, nothing to block the view. A baboon crouched on the bank of the roadway watching. A second observed from fifty meters on. Neither acknowledged the other. I noticed a bicycle bent in two tossed down on the grass….

While we waited for some force of civilization to take charge of the catastrophe, people descended from our bus to stretch their legs, eat their snacks, laugh, talk, relieve themselves. The three of us joined them at the roadside. Davidia shaded her eyes with a hand and studied the baboons studying us.

Michael said to Davidia, “He’s talking to you,” pointing to an old man who approached us. “He is a magician.” He looked less than magic, instead looked tiny and silly, sucking on a long purple sugarcane. “He says we are all captives of this world. We were stolen while we were asleep and we were carried here, and now we are held captive in this world of dreams, where we believe we’re awake.” While Michael translated, the magician laughed and hacked at his stalk of cane with his two or three teeth, snorting. He smiled brightly at someone he recognized across the road and turned away from us as we vanished from his mind.

Tree of Smoke, which won the National Book Award in 2007, is a monumental piece of fiction, a swirl of Vietnam War aftermath, ostensibly built around a CIA rogue. (As in The Stars at Noon and “The Laughing Monsters,” the foreign soil, heat and humidity exacerbate every activity, flavor every character.) There is a fully realized comparison here to Graham Greene. The distinction Greene drew between his “entertainments” and his serious fiction — his best books are both — was very simple. You could read the entertainments as adventure fiction; they make for really good movies. But underlying both was a genuinely brilliant examination of faith and belief, of human rectitude, and, always, the awareness and precision of language itself.

“The Laughing Monsters” is very funny, unpredictable to a fault, a gauzy and exciting read, but there is nothing light about it. The weight of corruption and moral decay, from the highest institutions to the individual players struggling to get through it all, would make Greene proud.