 "Marlon James")
December 3, 1976: The call went out to the neighbourhood just after the gunshots: “Blood claat! Is Seaga men! Dem come fe kill Bob!” Inside Bob Marley’s home on Hope Road in Kingston, Vivien Goldman wrote in The Book of Exodus , Bob called out after the four automatics had gone silent, “Is alright, Diane! Me here still.” He, Rita Marley, the band’s manager Lewis Griffiths and their friend Don Taylor had all been hit; all survived.
Marlon James was six years old when the attempt on Marley’s life shook Jamaica. In an interview to The Daily Telegraph , given before his Booker win for A Brief History of Seven Killings , he said: “Everybody heard about it. Marley was untouchable, so if he could be shot, anybody could be shot. I knew my parents were scared, even if I couldn’t understand why. There was a sense that anything could happen.”
What you feel strongly in childhood can stay with you for years; it takes a writer of James’ prodigious talent to get it down on paper, right what it felt like to live in the Kingston of those years, with violence revving its engine on the streets outside. As Bam-Bam, one of the 75-odd characters who talk to the reader over the book’s 686 pages, says, “Is a hell of a thing when a gun come home to live with you.”
James’ childhood neighbourhood — suburban, safe — was in contrast, sheltering, quiet, stable. But as he grew up, he found no safety in a country where homophobia was a norm. “At 28 years old, seven years out of college, I was so convinced that my voice outed me as a fag that I had stopped speaking to people I didn’t know,” he writes in From Jamaica to Minnesota to Myself (a piece he wrote for The New York Times ). He knew he had to leave, “whether it was in a plane or in a coffin”.
In his student years in America, he found a book that spoke to him, Salman Rushdie’s Shame, “It made me realise that the present was something I could write my way out of.” He said to Gawker that Shame gave him permission to write whatever he wanted.
The New York Times’ critic Michiko Kakutani used two sets of adjectives to describe A Brief History of Seven Killings “sweeping, mythic, over-the-top, colossal and dizzyingly complex… it’s also raw, dense, violent, scalding, darkly comic, exhilarating and exhausting.” James’ reaction to his Booker win was more compressed. He posted a photo of the trophy on his Facebook page; the caption read “Holy shit!”
For everyone who had read, loved (and had their blood pressure elevated by) A Brief History of Seven Killings, the hope that James would win was tempered by the fact that he was up against a very strong Booker shortlist. Hanya Yanagihara, Tom McCarthy, Sundeep Sahota, Chigozie Obioma and Anne Tyler are gifted writers. But Michael Wood, chair of the judges, said when they got down to it, picking James was a unanimous decision. He called it an “extraordinary book” — “very exciting, very violent, full of swearing”.
Marlon James’ greatest skill as a writer is not just his ability to reproduce voices, dialogue, but to put forward the idea that you can only understand histories — personal, of times, of places — through multiple perspectives, spinning from one character to another. Violence, betrayal, disruption race through A Brief History of Seven Killings. He writes about murder and other human horrors with intensity, but he does not romanticise ugliness; it is too real, too omnipresent, to be either shocking beyond a point or seductive.
There are no shortcuts to great writing: most overnight successes are years in the making. James honed his ability to juggle multiple voices in his first two novels, John Crow’s Devil and the grim but strikingly beautiful The Book of Night Women . A Brief History of Seven Killings is the riskiest of his three books, and the way up hasn’t been easy. James teaches creative writing; some 10 years ago, he almost gave up on his own writing, but then he published his first novel to good notices, and his second to critical acclaim. By his third, he had sharpened that early promise. “Half of the stuff in that book (A Brief History) I don’t allow my students to do,” he told Gawker .
There are three reasons to read Marlon James; because he’s won the Booker, because he knows how to pull off a big risk, and because, as a character in Brief History says, “Somebody need to listen to me and it might as well be you.”
