A Brief History of Seven Killings - Marlon James (Oneworld 2014)
- Edward Nightingale
- Feb 20, 2017
- 3 min read
If it no go so, it go near so.
As the title suggests, this book is about killing, but the ‘seven’ on the cover hugely underplays the body count. I didn’t actually tot up the corpses as I read but I reckon there are more than 50 – in one three-page chapter alone a gang leader shoots 11 people. Sometimes the description of killing is almost gratuitous, with bullets entering eye sockets and neck holes pumping blood; and sometimes it’s done as if off the cuff – a character dispatched in no more than a phrase. I came to expect that every few pages someone would be killed, and that makes for tense reading. Conflicts abound – JLP vs PNP, men vs women, Copenhagen City vs Eight Lanes, black vs white, police vs army, dons vs their enforcers – and killing is the result.
The next two most significant themes (though they don’t come close to killing) are politics and sex. The first half of the novel combines politics with killing as warring gangs vie for territory and votes on behalf of their favoured Jamaican political parties. As one gang member observes: “I don’t know people who don’t pick side.” In the second half sex replaces the politics, but that doesn’t make things better. The sex is vicious, bitter, secret. And this new thematic combination culminates in one particularly haunting image in which sex and killing unite in a New York crackhouse. Watch out for that one.
The novel is set first in Jamaica and then in the US, but in each country most of the locations are slums festering with drugs, guns and utter desperation. And it is loaded with characters – so many, in fact, that there’s a cast list at the beginning – about 15 of whom share the task of narrating. One of these is a ghost, a few are drug addicts, most are psychopaths. The Jamaican ones have names like Shotta Sherrif, Bam-Bam and Weeper, and deliver their first-person narratives in stream-of-consciousness patois. The language is by turns confusing and fascinating, with characters adapting their register and vocabulary to their listeners; words are blended or subverted – system becomes ‘shitstem’, politics ‘politricks’ and so on – such that the occasional explanation needs to be built in: “The I meaning you, meaning me. Ghetto communiqué, more backward and more forward than the phone.” But gradually I/you tune in.
And all but one of the narrators are men. In fact, the poison of patriarchy infects everything in this novel, exacerbating its brutality and the sense of futility. “Right and wrong is just two word some fool invent and what really matter is what I have over you and what you have under me,” concludes one gang leader. But it is the female narrator – tenuously associated with The Singer himself, and his Hope Road address – who represents the only chance of redemption in the novel. And, within the ambitious scope of this cacophonous work, she also provides something of a connecting thread.
It is not an easy read but it is a compelling and remarkable book. The characters’ voices ring true and the fusion of fiction with historical fact conjures a credible version of ‘Jamdown’ in the 1970s and ‘80s. It will also change the way you listen to Bob Marley forever.
Comments