Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

Sub-Saharan Africa is treated as a moral testing ground for Nicholas Garrigan, the narrator of “The Last King of Scotland,” a venturesome, sardonic first novel set in Uganda during the eight grim and turbulent years of Idi Amin’s dictatorial misrule. Fresh out of medical school, eager to escape his restrictive Scottish Presbyterian surroundings, having successfully passed his civil service exam in order to work abroad, Garrigan takes up his post as medical doctor attached to the Ministry of Health in Mbarara, a remote outpost in Uganda. Hours after his arrival in Uganda on Jan. 24, 1971, Garrigan, standing at a window, observes a column of tanks rolling past the hotel, not realizing that he is seeing the prelude to the following day’s violent overthrow of President Obote by Idi Amin, the commander of Uganda’s armed forces.

In an effort at historical verisimilitude, the author of this decidedly quirky yet absorbing novel, Giles Foden, a staff writer at the Guardian, has interviewed an impressive list of eyewitnesses to the horrific events in Uganda under the ruthless Amin. Convincing as the grisly accounts may be, it is left to Garrigan, ensconced on a bleak, tiny Scottish island where he is writing his painful Ugandan “memoir,” to affirm the novel’s central concern, namely the vagaries of human behavior--not least his own.

Garrigan is a recognizable figure from Western literature: the self-disparaging, self-absorbed, sexually naive, acutely observant loner. That Amin, the monstrous individual responsible for the murder of, at the very least, 300,000 Ugandans, should be the primal force Garrigan can’t resist is perhaps the ultimate irony in the memoir he’s writing. However, the reason for this strong attraction is not spelled out other than as a subtext--as something elusive, something to be inferred.

Beginning his story in the small under-equipped clinic in Mbarara, where he assiduously dispenses time-expired medicines to treat intestinal parasites, snake bites, machete gashes, VD and an ever increasing number of patients with bullet holes, Garrigan develops a crush on Sara Zach, a selfless Israeli physician who, unbeknownst to him, is also gathering information for Israeli Intelligence. Despite his off-putting clinical portrayal (“The bones in her face were brutal in the way they stood out, almost ugly. . . . In fact her whole way of carrying herself was like this”), they soon are lovers though, unpredictable novice that he is, Garrigan cannot resist describing their desultory lovemaking as being “[l]ike a training course for the rest of my life.”

Though he is competent as a doctor, Garrigan’s consistent negative self-portrayal raises questions about his mental stability: “My problem is that because the world doesn’t deliver what I seek, I don’t admit facts. It’s no way to be going on.” Apprised of the unexpected deaths of his father and then his mother, Garrigan, as if eager to demonstrate yet another flaw in his character, decides not to return for the funerals in Scotland, though he doesn’t offer any reason for this inexplicable decision. His reaction to the mass expulsion of 50,000 Asians following Amin’s capricious orders is similarly disconnected. Soon after, the ever unpredictable Amin, on a warpath against a host of imaginary enemies, banishes the Israelis. To Garrigan’s dismay Sara departs without so much as a goodbye--though not without first warning him to leave.

When Garrigan first sets eyes on Idi Amin, who has gone to Mbarara to deliver a speech, his customary reserve is nowhere in evidence. Instead, the usually diffident Scottish doctor appears smitten with the African leader: “[T]here was something fascinating about him; a quality of naked, visceral attraction that commanded the attention, mustering assent, overcoming resistance--fostering the loss of oneself in the very modulation of his voice.”

Hearing Amin on the radio identify himself as the last rightful King of Scotland, Garrigan confesses that this absurd communication had some special relevance to himself. And when he is summoned to assist Amin, who has sprained his wrist while carelessly smashing his red Maserati into a stationary cow, Garrigan promptly concedes that as he examined Amin, who was sprawled on the ground: “I felt--far from being the healer--that some kind of elemental force was seeping into me.” What matters is that Amin, beholding a sympathetic spirit, promptly invites Garrigan to become his personal physician. In Africa this kind of coincidence is customarily referred to as fate. Certainly, Garrigan behaves as if it were.

A festive dinner for the diplomatic corps serves as an introduction to Amin’s capricious conduct; it is there that Garrigan overhears Amin’s intentionally provocative statement: “I have also eaten human meat,” while the startled guests, the foreign diplomats and their wives, sit back not knowing how to react. As yet, still tolerant of Amin’s behavior, none of them perceives any threat to their immediate future.

Garrigan, feelings under tight control, settles into his new job close to the State House, the seat of power. In a number of brilliant vignette-like spectacles that highlight Amin’s frequently incalculable actions, Foden portrays the larger-than-life Ugandan ruler, ever vigilant and suspicious, with a combination of infantile guile and delusional grandiosity. Liberating Scotland is only one of his many half-baked ideas. However, his almost appealingly childlike behavior is invariably undercut by a gratuitous cruel streak, such as when, atop a platform in the middle of his swimming pool, Amin contrives to have his lunch served by a fully clothed waiter who, loaded tray in hand, frantically swims toward him, all the while fearing what might happen if he fails to deliver the tray intact.

The first time Garrigan pays Amin a doctorly visit, he is unsettled to find his partially undressed patient in the four-poster water bed complaining of severe stomach cramps while menacingly gripping a pistol in one massive fist. In the untidy master bedroom, where the improvising Garrigan uses an unorthodox method to alleviate Amin’s temporary gastric distress, Amin’s scattered belongings, like so many emblems, represent an index of his excesses, while to one side, artfully concealed behind the wall of pristine-looking law books, is the passageway to the nerve center of Amin’s controls and the secret chambers, the blood-splattered cells.

Soon after, no doubt as a measure of his increasing trust, Amin invites Garrigan to read his telegrams and rambling letters to Margaret Thatcher and other world leaders, including a petulant note addressed to Queen Elizabeth in which Amin fixates on his Scottish fantasy: “I am the first man to ask the British government to end their oppression of Scotland. If the Scots want me to be their King, I will.”

The turning point comes when Garrigan’s incriminating diary lands in Amin’s hands and he’s given a brief taste of terror in one of the tiny torture cells. As a further warning he’s made to witness the gruesome disemboweling of a fellow doctor accused of plotting against Amin. Soon it becomes Garrigan’s turn to grovel for his life, while Amin, sounding more and more like the aggrieved suitor, accuses him: “What is wrong that you do not love me?”

Garrigan, who by now has become the documenter of Idi Amin’s life, is also unwittingly made Amin’s agent of destruction when, to placate Amin, he delivers a package containing a bomb to a small plane about to take off. Foden, in creating an incongruous blend of darkest African history and comic fiction, has written a farcical novel that brings to mind the diabolical Evelyn Waugh. The introspective Garrigan experiences a failure of nerve that Waugh used with great relish to deride so mercilessly.

From Foden’s point of view, whatever Idi Amin, who has fled Uganda unscathed to Saudi Arabia at the story’s end, may be guilty of, it isn’t doubt or lack of emotions. By contrast, the emotionally stunted Garrigan, struggling with his vacillating feelings for Amin, strenuously insists on his own culpability. Intent on absolution, Garrigan gives up his one means of self-respect, his doctoring. To the end Garrigan keeps playing hide-and-seek with himself and his indefinable relationship to Amin. What is he concealing? Garrigan’s obsessive, overheated rhetoric (“Corrupted by the memory of acts I cannot abjure . . . I have abandoned my flesh” and “Yes, I have become him. Oh my Christ”) suggests that the dilemma may be more of a sexual than an ethical one.

Sounding like any deposed politician clinging to his prerogatives and privileges, Amin speaks on the phone to an unresponsive Garrigan, who is back in Scotland, seeking his assistance: “You were always a kind man to me, and I need your advice.” Garrigan, without saying a word, hangs up on him. His silence is telling. It’s the silence of the injured party, the man who has retreated to an island, the only place where--in monk-like solitude--he can protect himself against further distress. Though the image of Idi Amin, settled in a comfortable house on a beach in Jeddah, driving a Chevy Caprice, subverts the reality of the events in Uganda, it serves as a fitting climax to a story that never had a decided political or historical drift to be tracked on the map of Africa. Instead, it is an engrossing psychological case history to be pondered with the aid of another kind of map: Rorschach.