No Mercy: A Journey to the Heart of the Congo. - book reviews

Stranded in the equatorial African forest, temporarily deserted by his guide, surrounded by hostile villagers who believe him to be a sorcerer, the writer and scholar Redmond O'Hanlon finds himself reading Russian literature aloud to an orphaned baby gorilla. To soothe the peevish animal he begins with a passage from Goncharov's Oblomov, describing the "far-off days...when the air, water, forests, and plains were full of marvels," and when "man was not yet able to stand up to the dangers and mysteries of life and nature."

"We still can't, can we?" O'Hanlon manages to remark before the gorilla hurls the novel into the mud. "The more you know, the more frightening death is."

No Mercy: A Journey to the Heart of the Congo, the audacious O'Hanlon's remarkable new travelogue, is a voyage into a world of marvels and of fear. With a group of moody escorts, O'Hanlon boated and hiked into the wilds of the People's Republic of Congo (not to be confused with Congo, the country until recently known as Zaire), bending his keen eye on exotic wildlife and native custom, his destination the legendary Lake Tele, home of Mokele-mbembe, the Congolese Loch Ness monster.

O'Hanlon's wry and fascinating account of his adventure satisfies on many levels. Most immediately entertaining, perhaps, are the sketches of his eccentric companions, to whose boisterous good-humor and frequent crankiness the journey gives ample scope. Representing the host country's Ministry for Conservation of Flora and Fauna is Marcellin Agnagna, an exuberant biologist whose professional interest in crocodile growth-rates is vastly exceeded by his interest in seducing local women. Other members of the party include Marcellin's two brothers - one equally libidinous, one neurotically shy - and Lary Shaffer, an endearing American scientist permanently aghast at dirt, insects, triggerhappy soldiers, meals of manioc, and other ordeals. As resentments flare and varied sensibilities reveal themselves moment by moment, the portraits of these capricious explorers give the narrative resonance and shape.

While O'Hanlon limns personality with the fine strokes of a novelist, he chronicles birds and beasts as obsessively as any scientist. In the book's meticulous catalogue of Congolese fauna, O'Hanlon's vast zoological knowledge anchors astonishingly vivid descriptions. Detail follows detail, thick and fast:

A pair of Pigmy geese, smaller than Tufted duck, sat snug on the water in a bed of water-lilies. The white face and throat of the male, the metallic green of his head, shot with violet and blue, the sea-green of his earmuffs, the green of his back, his tawny-and-white flanks, the bright yellow stub of his bill.... camouflaged him so effectively against the green metallic shine of the wet lily-pads, their bright white open flowers, the white light flashing obliquely off the ripples....

The effect of so many specifics is almost hypnotic: Reading such passages, one begins to feel oneself slipping into a different kind of existence.

During his trek, O'Hanlon experiences just this kind of defamiliarization, an impression that intensifies as he encounters traditional African beliefs. Life in the Congo Republic increasingly seems to him to be haunted by irrational fears: faith in vengeful spirits, strange transformations, magical powers, and fetishes. He learns of individuals revered or hated for being sorcerers, and of women killed for giving birth to twins. He even runs across a novel argument against conservation surveys: when endangered animals can change into people and back again, how can one complete an accurate census?

O'Hanlon characterizes this worldview as "magical thinking," and by the time he reaches Lake Tele he has begun to feel himself "infected," as though he has learned to think in "the language of dream." Magical thinking, he concludes, is a way to manage fear. To eclipse the oppressive certainty of pain and death, a person creates "lots of little fears, fears you half-know are not serious, to diffuse the big horror into the landscape."

O'Hanlon's own journey provides frequent opportunity to wrestle with the big fear. His knowledge of tropical diseases makes him susceptible to dizzying attacks of hypochondria. And on two occasions - during a bout of malaria and after partaking of some suspect marijuana - he experiences eerie fever dreams, hallucinations that give the story an unnerving twist when he weaves them seamlessly into objective detail.

In a way, No Mercy itself operates by the logic of magical thinking, for its moments of existential panic alternate with stretches of mere anxiety and dread, sparked by the arcane political intrigues of rural Communists and village chiefs; by the dangers posed by crocodiles, gorillas, and other animals the explorers most wish to see; and even - rationalism notwithstanding - by rumors of the supernatural, for example, the tales of the sinister spirit Samale, who slashes his initiates with two of his three claws.

O'Hanlon, whose other exploits have included travels through the Amazon Basin and through headhunter territory in Borneo, comes across as a seeker after fear and hardship, for the sake of getting at the essence of things. Grueling adventures, he suggests, yield more truth than can be found in traditional religions, whether Western or African. "When you get faith," he tells Marcellin, who suspects that O'Hanlon is sneering at African beliefs, "you throw the switches, you blow a gasket, you deliberately go soft in the head." It is to describe monotheistic religions that the phrase "no mercy" finally surfaces, toward the end of the book.

Crammed as it is with detail and subtext, No Mercy is not light reading. But it is a profound, ambitious, and challenging work, frequently humorous, and full of thrilling observation. In O'Hanlon's hands, what could be a vehicle for armchair travel becomes a meditation on the nature of human belief. "I've discovered what you're after," a testy Marcellin snaps at the author at one point. "You want to know everything, don't you? All about Africa? The secret of life?" O'Hanlon can only agree.

Celia Wren is Commonweal's drama critic.

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