Things fall apart in Denis Johnson’s latest novel of madness and anarchy in Sierra Leone
‘I’ve come back because I love the mess. Anarchy. Madness. Things falling apart.’ The lines belong to Roland Nair, one of the morally bankrupt spies who careers around Africa in Denis Johnson’s tenth novel, but they might equally well describe Johnson himself, a writer always happiest in his work when the wheels come off and the world breaks down. His novels vary in setting (Prohibition America in Train Dreams, the Vietnam war in Tree of Smoke, a future post-apocalypse in Fiskadoro) but they share a mixture of gravitas and derangement, sarcasm and lyricism, comic danger and dangerous comedy that makes them reliably fascinating — and reliably peculiar. You certainly wouldn’t