African psycho

Taking both its title and its central storyline from Bret Easton Ellis' insert-adjective-of-your-choice-here American Psycho (well, I liked it), Alain Mabanckou's African Psycho is a succinct, disturbing but also frustrating read. Succinct in that it gets in, throws its punches in merely 145 pages, and gets out again before it overstays its welcome. Disturbing in both its subject matter and the hinted-at society it takes place in. And frustrating in the way it's presented.

If Ellis' serial killer (or was he?) Patrick Bateman was supposed to be the symbol of everything wrong with the shallowness of 80s America, rich, beautiful and seemingly powerful, then Mabanckou's Gregoire Nakobomayo could well be a symbol of sub-Saharan post-colonial Africa; orphaned at birth and brought up by a series of supposedly well-meaning but oppressive foster parents, he's a would-be serial killer whose shaven head is filled with bits and pieces of both African lore and European culture but who has no real use for either of them. He lives in a poor, stinking and perpetually alcohol-soaked district he calls He-Who-Drinks-Water-Is-An-Idiot, near One-Hundred-Francs-Only Street where girls from the countryside come to earn money the only way they can. And despite the fact that Gregoire himself is reasonably well off, he hates it. The only myth he has any use for is that of the legendary bandit and murderer Angoualima, and his one ambition in life is to become as famous a serial killer as his idol. If only he weren't such a complete failure at it... but now he's got a girlfriend, and he's going to start his career as a legendary murderer by killing her in the most inventive way he can figure out. Maybe.

Mabanckou's got talent, there's no denying that, both when it comes to style and content. As a narrator, Gregoire is a foul-mouthed, boisterous and rather pathetic figure. It's hard not to end up laughing at his impotent attempts to prove a villain (and the way he completely misses that he might have proved a lover); he tries to kill, rape and rob, but keeps failing and imagining his idol Angoualima laughing at him. He has no power over even his own actions, let alone the society he lives in. And there are passages where Mabanckou has him unwittingly offer both scathing criticism and sharp satire of a corrupt society, all of it set to the forbidden music of the band The Same People Always Get To Eat In This Shitty Country; somewhere underneath all of his rants, Gregoire really just wants to make something of himself. Be somebody. Have control over his own destiny.

The problem, however, is that everything we learn about him seem to suggest that giving Gregoire control over his own destiny would be a Very Bad Idea. Unlike some other despicable first-person psychos (Bateman, Humbert, Bickle, et al) there really is very little about Gregoire that allows us to empathize - let alone sympathize - with him. Over the course of the novel he never really changes much, and if his circumstances do, it's not because of anything he himself does; he's just swept along. In the end, a serial killer who isn't actually much of a serial killer is... well, just a really annoying guy. And spending time inside his head soon becomes more embarrassing than shocking or thrilling.

That's not to say that I disliked the book. African Psycho has moments of brilliance, both silly humour and harsh social critique, viewed through the eyes of a character who is more part of the problem than part of the solution, no matter what he himself may think. The psycho of the title is too harmless to be a threat in himself; he's a symptom of a greater disease, and the sobering and visceral glimpses we get of that make this well worth a read. Just as long as you don't mind laughing at rather than with the narrator.