Author shows two faces of genocide in harrowing novel

"Johnny Mad Dog" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 321 Pages. $26) - Emmanuel Dongala, translated from the French by Maria Louise Ascher

Sixteen-year-old Lao is a bright young woman, prone to stargazing and philosophical debates. Midway through Emmanuel Dongala's novel, lost again in her thoughts, she is jarred to a reality she cannot, for a moment, recognize - a leg-less woman clinging to the back of a man's bike as he struggles to navigate a city's cratered streets.

The woman is her mother, the man a hired stranger. They, along with Lao and thousands of others, are refugees in their own city, fleeing the murderous bands razing their West African capital during a senseless civil war.

Ostensibly militiamen and soldiers, these men are vicious, ignorant looters, raping and slaughtering their former neighbors just because they can. Johnny, or Mad Dog, is one of these creatures, a 16-year-old monster "drunk with blood and sperm."

He fancies himself an intellectual for acquiring a few years of schooling and blows away children at the whim of his delicate ego. His brutality is inexplicable, at times almost unreadable.

Mad Dog's shifting rationalizations and delusions form the flip-side of Lao's calm narration, until the pair's inevitable confrontation. Members of rival ethnic groups, they are two faces of a world most Westerners would rather ignore. As a European general explains in a radio broadcast heard by Mad Dog, "We aren't the ones who asked those people to go around killing each other."

Exactly who or what is responsible for this fictional war (or, by extension, the real and ongoing conflicts in nations like Sudan and the Republic of Congo, where Dongala lived until 1997) remains the novel's underlying debate, one that the author refuses to unequivocally answer - unlike the talking heads he portrays, who so blithely point to complex forces such as tribalism or globalization.

The answers, Dongala's stark, blackly comic novel asserts, are not so easy - there are no comforting "isms" to explain genocide. Everything is connected, hopelessly entangled.

Lao also fights to understand how such atrocities are unleashed and allowed to run unchecked - as well as how any goodness can survive in such a world. As she muses while weathering a rocket barrage in a storage shed, "After you've spent a good long time asking questions that are never answered, you get the feeling you're going around in circles and racking your brain for no reason."

If Dongala does not explain, he also does not excuse. Nobody gets off the hook, from the West African politicians with greedy, bloodstained hands to the self-righteous journalists who can't pronounce the names of the people on whom they report to the international forces who run over one of Lao's friends while saving white embassy workers.

"... She fell under the immense wheels of the heavy military transport. It was horrible. I closed my eyes and screamed. I couldn't look - I couldn't look."

Most of the time, Lao does look - as friends and relatives are killed, villages strafed and starving refugee children dressed up for photo-ops with the newest president to prove what a peace-loving, democratic man he is. The events that unfold would seem like fantasy, were they not similarly documented in news reports and books like Philip Gourevitch's masterful and harrowing account of genocide in Rwanda, "We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families."

As it is, the only aspect of "Johnny Mad Dog" that strains reader credulity is Lao's ability to maintain any hope at all. "The brain," she tells us, "is an extraordinary organ." In Lao and Mad Dog, Emmanuel Dongala gives us two, equally extraordinary portraits of this organ. It does not seem the two can long continue to coexist.