In the Sorcerer's Realm
MURPHY, RICHARD MCGILL
In the Sorcerer's Realm No Mercy: A Journey to the Heart of the Congo By Redmond ?'Hanlon Knopf. 462 pp. $27.50. Reviewed by Richard McGill Murphy Contributor, New York "Times Magazine,"...
...Because he is as well-read as he is observant, he is able to zero in on select subjects...
...It owes a debt as well to Conrad's dark fables of Europeans meeting personal demons in the African jungle...
...When O'Hanlon suggests the Congolese might have different standards of marital fidelity, Shaffer takes the antirelativist line: "Well, yeah, I don't go along with all that either...
...The tensions that define O'Hanlon's quest are refracted in the character of Marcellin Agnagna...
...Its spooky engagement with the dark side of the world it depicts, however, makes it something more than a runof-the-mill travel adventure...
...It is the first of many dire forecasts the pair will ignore...
...Only his wife's not pregnant...
...its identity and even existence remain tantalizingly undefined...
...He needs sex too...
...Samalé engages the author in a surreal debate about the West African roots of Freud's theory of the unconscious, then vanishes into the night...
...No Mercy, indeed, is a masterpiece of dialogue and description...
...At last he emerges from the jungle, wasted, filth-encrusted, exhausted—and refusing to part with a baby gorilla, a gift from a tribesman...
...No Mercy, at 462 pages, bears out the characterization...
...we are treated to a minidissertation on the morphology and breeding pattern of the tsetse fly, plus a brief history of sleeping sickness (with the author, like any hypochondriac, finding every symptom in himself...
...Like Thomas Pynchon in his recent novel Mason and Dixon, O'Hanlon uses male friendship to examine the relationship between reason and madness...
...That's right,' said Marcellin...
...He and the profane, brave, good-natured Shaffer survive weird village blood feuds in which visiting foreigners sometimes constitute convenient sacrifices...
...But O'Hanlon contracts an illness...
...Agnagna is reluctant to accept the fetish...
...A fierce rationalist who is researching crocodile growth rates for his doctorate from the Museum of Paris, Agnagna is descended from a line of crocodile sorcerers...
...Marcellin, in addition to being an indispensable guide, is a sexual Stakhanovite...
...I keep it in my pocket—and every time I think of Lake Télé and the fear comes, I touch it, and feel better...
...That leads to a discussion of the jungle Pygmies, followed by a debate with Shaffer about Agnagna's sexual morality and the merits of cultural relativism...
...Attached to Agnagna's is the wedding ring he had lost in the river that morning...
...The Army shot her and ate her.'" The hippo in heat serves as more than local color and comic relief...
...And the fact that none of his colleagues seem to share his compulsive curiosity suggests that the quest is a personal one...
...But then, the same might be said of reality in general in No Mercy...
...Before he does, though, he predicts that the author will die a "long, messy, mutilated death" at Lake Tél...
...But the narrator is intent on penetrating this mystery...
...Hence the search for Mokélé-Mbembé, the mystery beast...
...One wonders whether O'Hanlon taped every conversation he had or simply kept writing, always writing, during the trip...
...The narrative opens in the hut of a Brazzaville féticheuse, or fortune-teller, who announces that Shaffer will die if he remains in the Congo longer than two months...
...I'll go to pieces if I lose it, I know I will...
...Village elders provide picturesque narratives of tribal history that the author interweaves with meditations on the African roots of mankind...
...After navigating the shoals of Congolese officialdom, they head up the Ubangi River with Marcellin Agnagna, a Congolese zoologist whose reported sighting of a dinosaurlike creature in the remote Lake Télé is what prompted the author to make this trip...
...I don't agree it's okay to cut a young girl's clitoris out simply because you're a Muslim or a Seventh Day freakshow or a Born Again butthole or whatever...
...As for Mokélé-Mbembé, let's just say the reality at Lake Télé proves to be more subtle than the author had anticipated...
...After he gets bitten by a tsetse fly, for example, we don't simply learn what the bite felt like...
...Pynchon takes surveying in 18th-century America as a trope for the Enlightenment project of rationalizing the world...
...The caption reads: "Redmond: writing, always writing...
...Febrile dreams, memories of a deceased friend, afflict him...
...O'Hanlon too employs counterpoint—rationalistic explorers vs...
...O'Hanlon has previously explored highland Borneo with the British poet James Fenton, and the Amazon jungles with a nightclub manager...
...This man appears to be Samalé, who, along with Mokélé-Mbembé, is one of the two "animals of mystery" that shadow the expedition...
...Everything...
...What's wrong with a fetish?' he repeated, mocking my tone of voice...
...Late at night, sitting in a stoned stupor in a village hut, he is visited by an enormous man missing two fingers from his right hand...
...They eat some of the most repellent food in the history of travel writing...
...O'Hanlon presses on through swampforest and clouds of sweat-sucking bees...
...The book would be worth reading were it nothing more than a wry, well-rendered presentation of British innocence abroad, à la Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana or Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush...
...Lunching at a riverside café with Agnagna and one of his many mistresses, O'Hanlon notes: "In the middle of the tributary was a sandbank, and in the middle of the sandbank was a hippopotamus, and under the middle of the hippopotamus was his extraordinarily long, thin, tremblingly erectile penis...
...Congolese natives for whom spirit belief is a potent force and ancestors are tormenters to be warded off with fetishes or propitiated with sacrifices...
...You nasty little liberal,' said Marcellin quietly, with real force, taking me aback, not lifting his eyes from the ground...
...See...
...Muh, muh, muh,' said the hippopotamus...
...It is by sustaining this improbable balance of observation, science, rumination, and gonzo comedy throughout the book that O'Hanlon leaves other travel writers in his wake...
...Once you start that kind of nonsense, you can't stop.'" O'Hanlon soon receives a more intimate glimpse into the sorcerer's realm...
...the absurd experiences of his eponymous surveyors counterpoint the Cartesian rationality of their project...
...But he fundamentally accepts the metaphor of Victorian exploration, stretching it to its limits—that is, to the limits of his own reason—rather than merely drawing out the contrasts it offers...
...O'Hanlon's fetish bag contains the severed finger of a young child...
...Reviewed by Richard McGill Murphy Contributor, New York "Times Magazine," "New Republic" At the beginning of this book about a journey through equatorial Africa in search of a possibly extant dinosaur, there is a black and white photograph of the author...
...At one point he introduces O'Hanlon to his grandfather, who presents both men with fetishes to protect them from the malevolent spirits of Lake Tél...
...But if O'Hanlon's narrative lens is ultimately wide-angle, it is also a breathtaking zoom...
...We learn about the uneasy relations prevailing between Communist Party commissars and hereditary village chiefs, and about suffering among the Pygmies, who act as O'Hanlon's forest guides but are enslaved by the Bantu whenever they venture out of the woods...
...O'Hanlon asks him why...
...No Mercy owes much to the Victorian tradition of the scientistexplorer, updated for a post colonial world...
...O'Hanlon, the natural history editor at the Times Literary Supplement for 15 years, has a deep interest in 19th-century science...
...I have to have it with me...
...I keep it in my pocket...
...O'Hanlon's description of the beast in minute detail sets off a typical series of associations, starting with his consideration of a pygmy hippo...
...Wearing camouflage fatigues, an open-neck shirt and jungle boots, Redmond O'Hanlon sits at a rough wooden desk under a canopy of palm fronds, pen in hand...
...In fact, aside from the two hapless Westerners, most living things in this book are constantly having sex or thinking about it...
...That is one of its many virtues...
...It is several books, actually: a quirky travel yarn, a vivid meditation on African natural history, and a discourse on spiritualism and historymaking among Bantu and Pygmy populations in the Republic of the Congo...
...This time his companion and foil is an American animal behaviorist named Lary Shaffer, a picaresque figure who, despite having multiple sclerosis, bicycled across America before joining his old university friend for the Congo trek...
...apart from his excellent travel writing, he has published a scholarly work on Darwin...
...Even more remarkable is the way the deceptively haphazard narration adds up to a cultural and political panorama of the late-'80s Congo, just before constitutional reform transmuted Africa's first Marxist state into the dysfunctional democracy it is today...
...We don't know if it is an animal, a spirit or both...
Vol. 80 • October 1997 • No. 16
