The “freight dogs” of the title are pilots: shady operators who run illicit cargo in and out of central African war zones. The place is Zaire, subsequently the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The time in question is Africa’s violent decade, 1996 to 2007: the period that saw the First Congo War (which ended with the overthrow of Zairean dictator Mobutu) and the Second Congo War (which has still not fully ended).
It was a time of slaughter and mass displacements, of endemic corruption and shifting allegiances. It was, in other words, a very bad time to be an ordinary person; and the fate of one ordinary person in this period of carnage is the subject of Giles Foden’s long, dense, mostly gripping new book.
The ordinary person is Manu, who is a schoolboy in Zaire when the novel opens (in 1996, in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide) and whose growth forms the book’s unwavering central focus. Manu’s family are Congolese Tutsis, living on the border with Rwanda. They are accordingly in the line of fire when Rwanda invades Zaire, with the aim of crushing rebel Hutu groups hiding among legitimate refugees.
Manu (19) is waiting to attend college in Kinshasa; till then he spends his time “in the upland meadows with his cows and his flute”. Then history arrives, bloodily. Manu’s family are murdered by Zairean military forces, who are attempting to cleanse the border country of Tutsis. In a few swift pages, the Zairean soldiers have themselves been killed by a pro-Rwandan death squad, and Manu has been violently compelled to join the squad himself.
Eventually deserting, Manu finds himself taken up by Norm Cogan, a “freight dog”: Texan, ex-US army, alcoholic (and mostly, let it be said, a cliche), Cogan takes Manu under his wing, pun intended, and trains him to be a pilot. What follows is a bildungsroman that is also a perceptive, compassionate history of an enormously complex conflict.
Giles Foden has written superbly about Africa before. His best-known book, The Last King of Scotland (1998), takes the form of a memoir by a fictitious doctor who worked as Idi Amin’s personal physician. Ladysmith (1999) dramatizes a key siege during the Boer War through a fictionalisation of a love story that Foden found recounted in letters written by his great-grandfather. Zanzibar (2002), largely written before the September 11th attacks, presciently dramatizes the activities of Islamist terrorists and American intelligence operatives in contemporary Africa.
Foden spent part of his childhood in Malawi; he knows Africa well. But more than this: he is a novelist for whom history is a real presence. History, in his novels, operates as text as well as context; it isn’t, in other words, merely a decorative backdrop for interpersonal drama (as it tends to be in more bog-standard examples of historical fiction). Foden is interested in the ways in which history acts on us directly, and the ways in which we make our fragile negotiations with it.
As Manu is hauled bodily into the death squad’s truck, the sometimes-objective narrator comments, “in a way, this is where is all began, the push and pull between Manu being controlled by others and trying to exert some control over his own life – or at least trying to throw down some kind of anchor to prevent being dashed away.”
Manu’s life as a freight dog takes him, literally, to the front lines of the Second Congo War. These are some of the best sections of the book. Foden writes superbly well about the abrupt horror of actual, as opposed to fake-literary or cinematic, violence. He also has a nice way with descriptive prose. A forest “stretched in emerald-green continuity”. A volcano, seen from the edge of the crater: “The lava appears to promise organisation; predictability; a sequence; then summarily undermines what’s been promised.” A precisely accurate description of lava flows; also, of course, of life itself.
Some elements of Freight Dogs tilt pretty heavily towards cliche. Norm Cogan, the drunk pilot, is straight out of a B-movie; the dialogue can feel stagy or clumsily expository. (“It’s called The Passenger, I won it in a poker game, pretty much run the air firm from there, though we have an office at the airport too”.) But there are also long stretches during which the narrative is compelling, vivid and surprising.
Freight Dogs is a big book, in several senses; if not all of its many parts are in full working order, that’s really a small price to pay for the overall richness and power of its conception.
Kevin Power’s novel White City is published by Scribner UK.
