Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda

JP Stassen

Stassen's Deogratias is a perfect example of the raw power to be found in the image and the image alone. There can be little doubt that the climax of this book is as powerful as they come. It's just that what leads up to it has some big problems.

Deogratias is a survivor of the Tutsi massacre in 1994 in Rwanda, a madman who tries to use prodigious amounts of alcohol to drive the dogs out of his mind. The townsfolk consider him amusing but harmless; his friends from before that time just want to help him. We alternate between scenes of a present-day Deogratias searching endlessly for urwagwa, a cheap Rwandan banana beer, and scenes of Deogratias in early 1994, going along living his life as the Tutsi-Hutu race war was about to boil over.

It becomes obvious that something during the massacre drove Deogratias insane, and the book's big mystery is what that was. There is another mystery going on at the same time, as a serial killer in the present day is eliminating people close to Deogratias, making his remaining friends fear that he's in even greater danger from outside forces than he is from the dogs in his head.

There's so much to like about this book-- Deogratias' character is engaging, both before and after his mental damage. Stassen chose a wonderful vehicle for showing the transition of time. The rendering of the dogs in Deogratas' head, and the ways in which Stassen chooses to reveal them, are great. And, of course, the twin revelations of the mysteries are powerful scenes as they stand. However, while all this attention has been (rightly) paid to the nuances of Deogratias' character, the plot suffers considerably. By the time we get to those two revelations, we've seen barely enough of the plot to know there's a mystery going on. If you're not paying attention, you could miss both of them entirely. It would be a mistake to ask for the book to be more linear-- the inventive time sequencing is one of its strongest points-- but it might have worked a good deal better if it were a bit more linear in each of its separate linearities.

This is a book that shows Stassen has a great deal of potential, and one that has an important set of ideas to get across. It is not entirely successful in getting those ideas across, but it's easy for the reader to see where Stassen was going and fill in the blanks himself.