Give me more love or more disdain

William Boyd

MONROVIA MON AMOUR: A VISIT TO LIBERIA by Anthony Daniels John Murray, £17.95, pp. 206 The title is ironic, of course, as is the tone almost throughout this exiguous and pricey book. Anthony Daniels visited Liberia in Easter of 1991 shortly after the end of the Liberian civil war, that shocking, surreal, and thoroughly nasty little conflict that illuminated our news bulletins for a while before it was superceded by that far greater conflagration in the Gulf. Certain images of that civil war, certain personali- ties, certain atrocities will linger on in the mind, however, as the 20th century limps towards its conclusion: pyjama-clad, Disney-mask-wearing, AK47-toting 'boys': the various strutting warlords — Prince Johnson, Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor; the massacre of 600 refugees in a church . . . The list is not very long, but then this little flare-up in West Africa only fleetingly attracted the attention of the Western media.

We should be grateful, then, for Daniels' visit, and his alternatingly irritating and fas- cinating account, insofar as it will prevent us forgetting, for a brief while, yet another bloodsoaked and shameful episode in Africa's history. All the same, his motives for going there are never explicitly revealed. Judging solely from the tone of his observations he seems to have been drawn to Liberia by a kind of ghoulish mis- anthropy, a sinister schadenfreude. He looks at the Liberians and their appalling plight with all the empathy of a scientist examining bacteria through a microscope. `I am a controversialist', he avers at one stage, 'I am not emotional' he confesses at another, so perhaps the pose of mildly

amused disdain and contempt for Africa and all things African is meant merely to provoke.

If so, then in the event the aim is mis- guided. For, as Daniels guides us through the short, crazy history of the war, tours innumerable ruins, visits Prince Johnson and other personages surviving in the uneasy peace that prevailed, his voice veering from fair Evelyn Waugh pastiche, to knee-jerk Conservatism (too many poor jokes about lefties, arties and liberals) stimulates lassitude rather than outrage.

But, occasionally, there is a passage of bracing Swiftian rage at humankind and its manifest follies that suddenly moves the book onto another plane. It is at these moments too that Daniels allows his fastid- ious objectivity to drop and we can believe

for a moment that, despite the mad farce of the war and the madder farceurs, he pos-

sesses a sense of basic fellow feeling for the dead and devastated. Without these rare glimpses (particularly evident when he vis- its the site of the church massacre, and

when he writes about Venice in the book's envoi) the relentless, mannered cynicism

becomes enervating. The great contempo- rary commentator on Africa and its calami- ties is the celebrated Polish foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski someone who is just as honest and scathing about Africa's corruption and stupidity as Daniels, but who never forgets, as he lists the ghastly atrocities and evils he has wit- nessed, that there is a human cost that must be acknowledged and that sympathy for those who have suffered and endured is not an emotion of which one should be ashamed.

So, as the voice changes, then, so does one's reaction to the book. At one

moment, Daniels presents himself as a lan- guid flaneur — 'There is one thing to be

said in favour of a sacked city: afterwards it is very quiet' — and the archness of the forced aphorism has one squirming. And then there is an account of Daniels watch- ing a videotape of the torturing and death of Samuel Doe (both of Doe's ears are cut off) that is utterly chilling and the measure of anything Kapuscinski might relate. In Venice, too, the mask slips and Daniels allows himself to confess that:

Since my greatest desire is to write, I have come almost to fear the beauty and wordless- ness [the city] provokes in me; but Venice is so completely without parallel, so hauntingly exquisite, that its spell is irresistible even to me.

What? Even to this latter-day Diogenes? Never! D. H. Lawrence said 'Trust the teller, not the tale.' It was a piece of advice

from the writer designed to help the read- er, but in the case of Monrovia Mon Amour the direction of its counsel might profitably be reversed: the best sequences of the book occur when the teller forgets what pose• he

should currently be striking and trusts him- self and his capacity for human feeling for a moment or two.