The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson is one of the finest American writers.

Certainly my favourite.

Praised by fellow authors and frequently awarded prizes, somehow he still is not as well known as Cormac McCarthy or Richard Ford. He won the National Book Award for Tree of Smoke and his Train Dreams was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in a rare year they chose to pick no winner. He tends to change genres with each book from Crime Noir, to War, to Western, but the writing is always excellent - it makes me read pages twice in admiration.

The Laughing Monsters is another gem, perhaps too complex to sum up succinctly. Roland Nair is a Scandinavian travelling on a US passport, he is ostensibly working for the US military, although he follows what suits him. They have asked him to locate his old friend Michael Adriko, an African working several angles in Sierra Leone. Adriko has a wild past of spying and running doubtful schemes, some in the past involving Roland, and he invites Roland to meet his new fiance. The three then travel to the Uganda-Congo borderland and the village where Michael grew up where they will marry.

Roland is not only drawn into Michael's latest get rich quick scam (involving the sale of fake uranium to the Mosssad), he has his own scam on the side selling the location of US safe houses and fiberoptic networks. The whole infrastructure of Freetown is collapsing with no electricity or communications most days. They spend a few days drinking before heading out undercover, crossing several borders without visas. If they get to Ghana, they can buy papers there.

It reminded me most of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, as the journey becomes more harrowing and the danger increases with roaming gangs, starving villages, and a pointless destination abandoned by the future. It's both terrifying and ridiculous.

If this description doesn't intrigue you, it's the writing that will capture you. Beautiful and spare, it really drew me in, he has a way of dropping lines that don't fit in, given time he brings them all together. There are so many subtleties it's hard to describe except to say it's one of the best books I've read in a long time, and my favourite of his (well, after Jesus' Son which is the best book of short stories I've ever read).

To me it's a classic from one of the top writers in American literature.

2014 / Hardcover / 228 pages