A monster deprived of insight
Francis King
A LONELY DEVIL by Sousa Jamba Fourth Estate, £12.99, pp. 154 It is a common fallacy that people incapable of love are unlovable. But in the case of Nando, the protagonist of Sousa Jamba's A Lonely Devil, the two conditions are clearly interlinked. Illegitimate son of a philandering father whom he never knew and who eventually hanged himself, and of a fado-singer mother who, when he was only four, relegated him to an orphanage, Nando describes his story as that 'of a man who set out on a quest for love and inno- cence'. In that quest he is constantly baulked. At the close he remains what he has always been: unloving, unloved, corrupt, evil. The imaginary island-state, once a Portuguese colony, of Henrique lies off the coast of Africa. It is here, in a microcosm of Jamba's own Angola, that Nando is born. Parentless, rootless, not a member of the dominant Monangola clan, he relies solely on intelligence, cunning and ruthless- ness to make his way in a world of danger- ously perverted Marxism.
Like a number of other 20th-century literary heroes remorselessly on the oppor- tunistic make — John Braine's Joe Lamp- ton of Room at the Top comes to mind — Nando tells his unedifying tale with a mix- ture of bravado, self-satisfaction and self- hatred. But none of his predecessors approaches any way near to being the kind of monster that he is. 'I will pour out my heart and hope that someone will empathise with me,' he announces. Some hope! Admittedly life in imaginary Hen- rique, as in so many real countries of Africa, is a hell infinitely worse than in colonial days; but Nando's character — as Jamba's title acknowledges — is diabolical.
At school, the horrendous fate of one of the most talented and handsome of his fel- low pupils is greeted by him as 'a pleasant surprise' — 'Roberto caught some disease, which left him not only paralysed but, to my immense pleasure, half blind.' Later, Nando gleefully allows the whole school to be punished for the supposed theft from him of a book, a gift from one of the teach- ers, which in fact remains secreted in his locker.
After he has grown up, worse enormities follow. Having taken up with a highly intel- ligent and cultivated woman perilously out- spoken in her opposition to the regime, he has no compunction in betraying her to the secret police when it seems likely that, if he does not do so, he himself may be found guilty by association with her. Soon, she has been executed.
By now a journalist, Nando himself joins the secret police, first as an informer and then as an officer of an internment camp where suspects are interrogated under tor- ture. His sadistic zeal in not merely devis- ing and administering tortures but in some cases even killing prisoners, far outstrips that of any of his colleagues.
Until these tortures and killings, the nar- rative has been altogether too perfunctory and pallid. Then, as though leech-like it were absorbing the blood spattered so freely in Nando's orgies of violence, it swells, acquires a hideous substance, grows bloated and vivid. Torture is a disgusting thing, and these pages are disgusting. But there is no denying their power.
Eventually Nando is despatched to Brazil, in order to gather information about opponents of the regime who have found refuge there. Taking up with a Brazilian woman painter of African descent, he defects and decides to settle in Bahia. But the devil within him cannot be exorcised. When, amateurishly, three youths attempt to mug him, he kills one of them in brutal fashion and without any sub- sequent feelings of remorse. The book con- cludes with his purchase first of a coffin for himself and then of some sleeping pills, with which to commit suicide. He ordains that he be buried with a copy of Nostromo (a book which he has been attempting to read throughout his story), and that a samba party, lasting all night, should follow his funeral.
As I have already indicated, Nando clearly hopes that, for all the debauchery and wickedness of his conduct, he will somehow, by some miracle, command the empathy (a word he repeatedly uses) of the reader. Whether Jamba nurses the same hope for his protagonist, one can only guess. At all events, if he does so, the hope is unlikely to be realised.
The regime in Henrique is monstrous; and what Jamba seems to be saying is that monstrous regimes and monsters spawn each other. Nando is equally contemptuous of the oppressors and of the victims in the small, vicious society which he depicts. Were the latter eventually, by some rever- sal of fortune, to become the former, then he is in no doubt that they would behave equally badly.
At the age of 27, Jamba — a past winner of the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, administered by The Spectator — has already achieved a great deal as a journalist in England, Portugal and his native Ango- Ia. Perhaps because of so much frenetic activity, this novel, his second, sometimes reads like no more than a sketch for a book still to be written. But there is no doubt either about the raw, savage urgency of its 50,000 or so words, or about its author's blazing talent. I doubt if any white novelist would dare to portray black Africa with so much hatred, disgust and contempt. Were he to do so, I doubt if any publishing firm would dare to accept his book — even if it were as vivid, honest and eloquent as Jambs's.
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