Johnny Mad Dog.

JOHNNY MAD DOG

BY EMMANUEL DONGALA, TRANSLATED BY MARIA LOUISE ASCHER

NEW YORK: FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX. 336 PAGES. $24.

In 1997, when rival militia factions divided the city of Brazzaville, the Congo Republic was stripped of domestic order and thrust, overnight, into civil war. Some ten thousand people died in the ensuing violence and chaos. Another half-million lost their homes. "In our country there was no longer any logic," explains Laokole, one of two teenage narrators in Emmanuel Dongala's compelling fourth novel who alternately recount their country's experience.

Dongala--who, after living through a good part of the conflict himself, now resides in Massachusetts (though he continues to write in his native French)--opens his story with an army general's announcing of a forty-eight-hour period of authorized looting. Yet in a country where the customs inspector wallows in stolen goods and a government-militia fighter's home looks like "Ali Baba's cave," looting has no precise beginning and no foreseeable end, and Dongala quickly reveals this declaration to be a bitter joke: "Who the fuck did he think he was, with his 'forty-eight hours'?" scoffs sixteen-year-old militia leader Johnny Mad Dog, the novel's second narrator. "Did he really think we needed his okay?"

Though the violence in Brazzaville was officially portrayed as an ethnic conflict, Dongala's story suggests that it was actually little more than greed-inspired chaos. In the novel, members of the Dogo-Mayi tribe murder one another as easily as they do members of their rival tribe, the Mayi-Dogos, yet many intertribal friendships remain. Several of the incidents of ethnic cleansing seem downright haphazard: At one point, militiamen set up a roadblock at which they systematically stop and kill anyone whose name begins with an A, X, or T. This chaos of course makes Laokole's search for safety all the more harrowing. As she runs from refuge to refuge, fleeing the destruction of Johnny's cohorts, it becomes clear that there is no sanctuary anywhere in the country. Even within the refugee camps, women and children are raped and starved; men are rounded up for extermination.

Yet, for a book brimming with violence, loss, avarice, and humiliation, Johnny Mad Dog is a surprisingly enjoyable read, largely due to the warmth and intelligence of Laokole's narration. A young woman who dreams of building "skyscrapers that will defy gravity and astound my father," she is Dongala's strongest female character to date. With her, he seems to move away from the archetypal characterizations of his previous books and toward greater psychological complexity. If his prose occasionally rises too sharply with indignation, if the persecuted are occasionally too saintly, it hardly matters. This is a book that yanks back the curtain on a neglected part of the world and allows us to comprehend the horrors its author has seen firsthand.