The laughing monsters

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The Laughing Monsters (English original title: The Laughing Monsters ) is a novel by the American writer Denis Johnson . It was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014 . Three years later the Rowohlt Verlag published the German translation by Bettina Abarbanell . It is Johnson's last novel published before his death and at the same time his first foray into the genre of espionage literature . He set the story of unreliable loyalties , friendship and betrayal in a chaotic environment in Africa .

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After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the international secret services are booming . Roland Nair, who has an American passport but pretends to be Dane even though he hardly speaks a word of Danish, is sent to Sierra Leone on behalf of the NIIA, NATO's intelligence service , where he meets Michael Adriko, who is from the border region between Uganda and the Congo and works for the US Army . The two men become friends, make big money in smuggling and illegal business in the chaos of the civil war and repeat this years later in Afghanistan , where Adriko acts as driver and bodyguard for Nair.

Eleven years later, Nair travels to Freetown again . Officially, he is looking on behalf of NIIA after Adriko, the desertion has committed and is submerged. Secretly, however, Nair has returned to Africa because he loves the chaos, the madness, the anarchy and the decay, and because it has always been his African friend who has spiced his bland life with tension and adventure. When he meets Adriko, he has a woman at his side, Davidia St. Claire, a young African American and daughter of the site commander of Fort Carson in the US state of Colorado , where Adriko was last stationed. He travels to Uganda, where he hopes to find the remains of his Kakwa clan, who was expelled after Idi Amin's death , in order to marry Davidia with the blessing of his village. This is said to be at the foot of those mountains that the missionary James Hannington once called "the laughing monsters" before he was murdered by locals.

Not least the presence of other secret agents stirs up Nair's suspicion that Adriko has other intentions under the guise of a honeymoon. In fact, it soon turns out that his friend has Uranerz in his luggage, which he plans to sell to the Mossad as radioactive U-235 for a price of one million dollars through a South African middleman named Kruger . He speculates on the fact that the secret services have inexhaustible financial resources because of the rampant terrorism hysteria and that they still have to take the most brazen fraud seriously if it has the slightest credibility. Nair overcomes his initial dismay at his friend's risky plans and agrees to participate, because like him, there is only one thing he doesn't want: to return to a boring existence. The NIIA, however, to whom he regularly reports on secured Internet connections, which are always a little adventure to establish in Africa, he withholds his friend's plans, just as he believes that the agency has kept the explosive background of his monitoring assignment from him.

The conspiratorial meeting with Kruger in Arua goes wrong and ends in a scuffle, after which Adriko, Davidia and Nair set off in a stolen jeep for the Congo. On the hectic drive over unpaved roads, they run over a local without stopping. After their vehicle breaks down, they seek refuge in a village that is attacked and looted by the Congolese army . After his capture, Nair is transferred to the US Army Special Forces and interrogated in an unofficial detention center . From there he writes hallucinating letters to a woman, of whom he himself does not know whether it is his friend Tina, whose love he has abused to obtain secret documents that he has stored on a hidden USB Stick, or about Davidia, with whom he fell in love despite her connection with Michael, and who is flown to the USA after an intervention by her father.

Like Adriko before, it is now Nair who uses the bluff with the supposed radioactive uranium to pull himself out of the affair without any consequences. Equipped with a sack full of fake gold, he is supposed to make contact with the escaped Adriko again in a covert operation to monitor the deal. After a long search, Nair finds Adriko in his home village under Njuwada (New Water) Mountain. The village is impoverished and dilapidated, the water is poisoned by the extraction of raw materials, and the remaining villagers are exploiting the substance of their huts and are fleeing intoxicated with alcohol and drugs. They are ruled by the crazy village queen La Dolce. Nobody recognizes the returnees Michael. It takes a long time before Nair can convince his desperate friend to join Seventh-day Adventist missionaries to leave the doomed place. Back in Freetown, Adriko and Nair are already planning the next villain play, maybe in Liberia , where a lot is possible. Before that, however, Nair sold his USB stick with the secret documents he had collected.

background

Denis Johnson first visited West Africa in 1990 for the American magazine Esquire to report on the Liberian Civil War and the rebel leader Prince Johnson . His report ended with the words: “The question is: where is Liberia? Does anyone out there care? ”Since then, Johnson has traveled to Africa again and again, and wrote literary reports from Somalia for various magazines , among other things . His reports on Africa, translated into German, were published in 2006 in the volume In der Hölle. Look into the abyss of the world. In Johnson's very diverse fictional work, The Laughing Monsters was the first novel to be set in Africa. Before it was written, the author traveled to Uganda for four weeks.

Through his father, who worked for the United States Department of State as a liaison between the United States Information Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency , Johnson learned about the world of intelligence early on. He treated her already in his 900-page epic War One of smoke ( Tree of Smoke , 2007) about the Vietnam War . The Laughing Monsters wasn't Johnson's first foray into the crime fiction genre . In terms of style and characterization of his hardboiled heroes, he tied in with his predecessor No Movement! ( Nobody Move , 2009), a weird noir crime thriller. The protagonist's experiences with intoxicants and hallucinogens reflect Johnson's own experiences at a young age, which already provided the background for novels such as Already Dead ( Already Dead , 1996) or the short story collection Jesus 'Sohn ( Jesus' Son , 1992).

interpretation

In an interview with the New Yorker , Johnson described The Laughing Monsters as a "literary thriller ". Elsewhere he called the book "an agent story with serious intentions, if you will". Which implicitly means for Peter Körte that modern agent stories, unlike those of the old masters of the genre such as Graham Greene , Eric Ambler or John le Carré , are not too serious, too remote from reality or not deep enough. Johnson differs from the classic rules of a detective novel, which always starts with the mystery, the secret, in that he does not want to resolve the uncertainty in the course of the plot, but on the contrary continues to dissolve the certainty. In the trick of only reporting the progress of the action from a certain moment via e-mail, Florian Schmid sees a form of "the digital letter novel ".

Roland Nair, the first-person narrator of the novel, is a classic, unreliable narrator , whom Körte as a reader may as little believe as Nair, for his part, believes the stories of Michael Adrikos. With all the deceptions and lies that Johnson's characters use throughout the novel, the words themselves lose their reliability, which Nair once commented with the sentence: “What words should I use? Absurd. Impossible. Not in keeping with reality. ”For Körte, Nair's delirious report resembles a“ malaria fever dream ”or an intoxication that makes things stand out more clearly than sober contemplation. Adriko anticipates the current debates about fake news and alternative facts by stating: "Reality is not a fact."

According to Christopher Schmidt , Johnson draws a reflection of the fourth-generation warfare , the modern form of warfare, in The Laughing Monsters , characterized by a “cloudy mix of global backyard wars with their dubious alliances and opaque friend-foe movements”. At one point, Johnson comments on the changes in the world of the secret services and the military as a result of September 11, 2001: “The world powers are opening their coffers for an expanded version of the old 'big' game. Money just has no limits, and much of it is spent on whistling and spying. There is no recession in this area. ”Elsewhere it says:“ Since Nine Eleven, the hunt for myths and fairy tales has become a serious business. An industry. ”Africa is not only the place to which the great powers outsource their conflicts, as a continent of myths and legends it also serves in the novel as a symbol“ for the phantasms that drive these conflicts ”.

"Friendship, trust and betrayal" is how Michael Schmitt names the themes of the novel, whose title The Laughing Monsters can be related to the two protagonists as well as to their travel destination, a mountain range in Uganda. The view that both men cast on the African continent is that of uprooted cynics who are looking for nothing more than their advantage, for which they manipulate all companions. In it, Schmitt's novel is reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling's early story The man who wanted to be king . This, too, moves between tragedy, delusion and comedy, but while Kipling sends his heroes into decline in the end, Johnson's characters are invulnerable stand-ups, between self-destruction, unscrupulousness and greed, who always have an ace up their sleeve. The novel does not lead to any purification either, but only to a confession of friendship between the two men, which the previous events reveal as lying.

When it comes to the road movie , the adventurous journey through Africa, Christoph Schröder thinks , like many other reviewers, of Joseph Conrad's story Heart of Darkness, which is also based in the Congo . But while in the classic, the trip to Africa still serves as a mirror for the human soul, disillusionment is no longer possible with Johnson, because nobody is still under illusions. In the often criticized political and psychological ambiguities in his work, Johnson's worldview of a “world without metaphysical support and without mercy” finds its counterpart. For Christopher Schmidt, Johnson's works on “unredeemed seekers of God” form one of the “blackest continents in literature”, the author's “inner Africa”.

reception

When it appeared in the American press in 2014, The Laughing Monsters received respectful but restrained reviews, which Johnson's last novel often sees as just a minor work by the writer who died in 2017. Weaknesses in the composition, the non-stringent plot and the clichéd image of Africa were criticized. In March 2017, German-speaking critics ranked the novel at number 1 in the monthly best list of crime novels .

expenditure

  • Denis Johnson: The Laughing Monsters. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2014, ISBN 978-0-374-28059-8 .
  • Denis Johnson: The laughing monsters. Translated from the English by Bettina Abarbanell. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2017, ISBN 978-3-498-03342-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Gerrit Bartels: Everything lies and rumor . In: Der Tagesspiegel from January 31, 2017.
  2. ↑ Michael Winroither: Gamblers and delinquents . In: ORF.at from January 19, 2017.
  3. ↑ a b c d Peter Körte: Nothing is certain! . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of February 21, 2017.
  4. ^ A b Florian Schmid: Lost in Freetown . In: The Friday of March 1st, 2017.
  5. ↑ Wieland Freund : How to make money in the fight against terrorism . In: Die Welt from February 22, 2017.
  6. ↑ Deborah Treisman: This Week in Fiction: Denis Johnson . In: The New Yorker, February 21, 2014.
  7. ↑ Dominik Kamalzadeh: Denis Johnson: Deception on all levels . In: Der Standard from July 4, 2017.
  8. ↑ a b c Christopher Schmidt : God is a dealer . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of January 21, 2017.
  9. ↑ a b Michael Schmitt: Friendship, Trust and Treason . In: Deutschlandfunk from January 22, 2017.
  10. ↑ Christoph Schröder: Torn souls . In: The time from February 1, 2017.
  11. ↑ Tobias Gohlis : From Voodoo Terror and Dictators . In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur, March 3, 2017.