There is a distinct literary genre associated with imperial peripheries. In Britain, it is known as Greeneland, the world of Graham Greene — those dusty forgotten outposts where morality is suspended, the political illusions of the metropole are laid bare, and lost men are free to sin beyond judgement. It is a 20th-century genre, cognisant of evil and its consequences. Today, as our nightmares are once again filled with foreign wars, dubious casus belli, and mercenaries who operate beyond national flags, it is refreshing to return there, a place where cynicism breaks bread with truth.
Denis Johnson’s novel The Stars at Noon (1986) is the great American example of this form, a wet, hallucinatory junket through the jaws of hell that foreign interventions can become — in this case, 1984 Nicaragua, as CIA-backed Contras wage war on the Sandinista government. One of Johnson’s lesser-known works, the novel takes the form of an anti-travelogue narrated by an unnamed young American woman who will definitely not be documenting this unaesthetic excursion for Instagram.
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