A Brief History of Seven Killings
Marlon James
Oneworld Publications
A Brief History of Seven Killings is the Booker-winning third novel by Jamaican writer Marlon James. It forms around a sprawling and messy plot that centres on the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976. But the narrative is far broader, taking in political intrigue, gang violence and investigative journalism, and it spans well beyond Marley’s eventual death from cancer in 1981. The novel borrows its narrative setup from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, with multiple characters narrating events simultaneously. This works well for Faulkner, whose narrators spend most of the book atop the same wagon, but is less successful for James, whose characters are separated by large distances or only tenuously linked. As I Lay Dying was a taut 270 pages while, James’s novel is closer to 700. The effect is to slow the main plot right down, while the individual narrative strands move at a great clip thanks to James’s punchy prose.
The characters’ usage of Jamaican patois shifts as they evolve, especially to show new identities, or to reflect the narrative’s move from Jamaica to New York. Any suspicion the reader may harbour that a rudeboy from a Kingston shantytown might be unliterate is quickly disabused. Still, when the language of *every* narrator exhibits the same variability, often within the same section, this starts to look like inconsistency. The novel has been compared to the films of Tarantino for its sensationalist and unremitting violence. These intense brutal exchanges are shown in parallel to the New York gay scene embraced by one of the book’s most violent characters. The Booker judges attributed the novel’s win to its ability to surprise, which definitely proves the case. Saying that, it’s also undisciplined and baggy, and could afford to be shorn of 200 pages. It’s certainly not as good as Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, which didn’t even make the Booker longlist. But then Ishiguro has one already.
Words: Eoin Tierney
