'I cut off his ears and made him eat them'

In this book of strange journeys and shocking confrontations, novelist and poet Denis Johnson travels to the ends of the earth, to the most hellish places available, apparently in search of personal humiliation and psychological trauma. Having been to Liberia once, tormenting himself in a world of random killings, torture and stinking corpses, he goes back and has an even worse time. "Why did I go to Liberia?" he asks himself. "What was I thinking, why did I do it, why? I don't know. I don't know." He's not like one of these war reporters who come over all hard and flinty, as if they were from a different species. He's an ex-hippie with a poet's sensibility. He explains how, upon being arrested, he weeps and begs for his life and blurts out the names of his contacts, unaware that he is betraying them. "I wept, I snuffled," he tells us. "I was right to call myself confused." His descriptions of being in an African jail, completely unsure of his fate, recall Orwell's essay A Hanging. Here, though, the white reporter is not a dignified colonial official. He is post-colonial - weepy, terrified, and in desperate trouble. "I'd come to this place," he tells us, "and I was not whole enough or real enough to accept its terms."

Johnson is a wizard with words. In his essay The Civil War from Hell, he takes us through the mess that was Monrovia during the Prince Johnson regime. He describes things with extraordinary precision, and pulls off a wonderful trick - as he takes you deeper into the madness and terror, he makes you laugh. I was laughing out loud, snorting with a sort of forced hysteria at the pathos, grotesqueness and absurdity of it all. Johnson quotes the Acting President of Liberia, Prince Johnson, on the death of his predecessor, President Doe. "I cut off his ears and made him eat them," says the Acting President.

I can't remember much war reporting as good as this. Like Michael Herr's Despatches, you could say that it rocks: it chugs along, rhythmic, engaging the emotions, not claiming a false authority.

When he arrives at Prince Johnson's compound, he finds the warlord, absurdly, "gripping an acoustic guitar and singing Rivers of Babylon ... He's backed by other guerrillas on conga, two electric guitars, and a rinky-dink electric organ. They're good. They could easily make a living in some Los Angeles nightclub." This is frightening. Johnson's prose burns with muffled hysteria. The singing warlord "shuffles like Michael Jackson and goes down on one knee like Elvis Presley ... He wears yellow, high-topped, lizardskin shoes." The person next to me, as I read this, said, "why are you laughing?" And then something absolutely appalling happens. Prince Johnson suggests that the journalists might like to see a videotape of his interrogation of President Doe. This is one of the most shocking things I've ever read. "Two boys," writes Johnson, "hold the screaming president while another saws his left ear off with a field knife." Denis Johnson realises that the room in which he is watching the tape is the room in which the events depicted on the tape happened.

It's not all war reporting. Johnson hooks up with some of his former hippie friends and attends a gathering in Oregon, where he sees that the flower people, now in their fifties, have become "weather-burned and dusty and gaunt". He also spends time at a Bikers for Jesus rally among racist thugs, mines for gold in Alaska, and travels to Afghanistan - before 11 September - where he discovers that: "Fighting, it's what they do, it's all they do, there's nothing else to do."

Why does he do these things? We get some insight. An old friend tells Johnson that "he's got hepatitis C and thinks I probably have it, too, because he must have picked it up way back during the era we were sharing needles when we were kids". This is a writer who has always thrived on danger and confusion. "I don't feel sick," he tells us. "But it's funny. Thirty years go by, and the moves we made just keep bringing this old stuff rolling over us."