"Don't make monster then bawl how them monstrous"
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS
Marlon James
This was the greatest book I've read so far this year. I finished it a week or two ago, and still have not been able to stop singing its praises and reading entire paragraphs aloud to my siblings. I've lost count of how often I've held one of them hostage and forced them to read entire pages while I watched.
This book, clocking in at just under 700 pages, is the opposite of brief. And there are far more than seven killings in this examination of Jamaica's political history in the 1970s and the subsequent birth of the crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s New York, the myriad storylines and various characters all spokes on the wheel at whose center is a 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley, who, here, is not simply a singer but a political icon and, more powerfully and impressively, a messianic totem.
On December 3, 1976, on the eve of the Jamaican general election and only a few days before the Smile Jamaica Concert, organized by the PNP political party to ease tensions and soothe local animosities, seven gunmen burst into Bob Marley's compound and lit the place with machine-gun fire, injuring Marley, his wife, his manager, and others. In keeping with his seraphic character, Marley survives. The rumors that the attack was politically motivated are the premise on which this titanic mansion of a novel is built. Each chapter is narrated by a character from the voluminous dramatis personae that opens the book, among them a deceased Jamaican politician, a Rolling Stone journalist, CIA agents, CIA freelancers, child gunmen, terrorists, a receptionist. Each voice is unique and kinetic, much of the novel written in patois and, in some cases, supernova-ing into the most remarkable use of stream-of-consciousness I've ever read. A scene where one of the gunmen, barely a teenager, coming down from a cocaine high after the assassination attempt, is dragged up a hill and buried alive is one of the most harrowing things I'd ever read, each stone digging into his back as he is being dragged, each clump of dirt tossed onto his writhing body, wildly catalogued.
The violence stands on the same plateau as that found in Cormac McCarthy's sanguine masterpiece. And language and rampant misogyny add cancerous flavor to that violence. This was not an easy read, but it was a swift one. That isn't to say it's without faults, that it doesn't drag in places, particularly in the Alex sections, and that some characters go absolutely unexplained (looking at you Sir Arthur Jennings). But the sheer ambition of this book and the multitude of levels on which it succeeds overwhelm the aforementioned faults.
This was As I Lay Dying with an assassination attempt on Bob Marley substituted for Addie Bundren's funeral, and substituting an entire nation for a single family.
This book--this loose, baggy, occasionally digressive, bloody, scopic book--is a tour de force. What's more, it is a masterpiece.
Marlon James
This was the greatest book I've read so far this year. I finished it a week or two ago, and still have not been able to stop singing its praises and reading entire paragraphs aloud to my siblings. I've lost count of how often I've held one of them hostage and forced them to read entire pages while I watched.
This book, clocking in at just under 700 pages, is the opposite of brief. And there are far more than seven killings in this examination of Jamaica's political history in the 1970s and the subsequent birth of the crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s New York, the myriad storylines and various characters all spokes on the wheel at whose center is a 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley, who, here, is not simply a singer but a political icon and, more powerfully and impressively, a messianic totem.
On December 3, 1976, on the eve of the Jamaican general election and only a few days before the Smile Jamaica Concert, organized by the PNP political party to ease tensions and soothe local animosities, seven gunmen burst into Bob Marley's compound and lit the place with machine-gun fire, injuring Marley, his wife, his manager, and others. In keeping with his seraphic character, Marley survives. The rumors that the attack was politically motivated are the premise on which this titanic mansion of a novel is built. Each chapter is narrated by a character from the voluminous dramatis personae that opens the book, among them a deceased Jamaican politician, a Rolling Stone journalist, CIA agents, CIA freelancers, child gunmen, terrorists, a receptionist. Each voice is unique and kinetic, much of the novel written in patois and, in some cases, supernova-ing into the most remarkable use of stream-of-consciousness I've ever read. A scene where one of the gunmen, barely a teenager, coming down from a cocaine high after the assassination attempt, is dragged up a hill and buried alive is one of the most harrowing things I'd ever read, each stone digging into his back as he is being dragged, each clump of dirt tossed onto his writhing body, wildly catalogued.
The violence stands on the same plateau as that found in Cormac McCarthy's sanguine masterpiece. And language and rampant misogyny add cancerous flavor to that violence. This was not an easy read, but it was a swift one. That isn't to say it's without faults, that it doesn't drag in places, particularly in the Alex sections, and that some characters go absolutely unexplained (looking at you Sir Arthur Jennings). But the sheer ambition of this book and the multitude of levels on which it succeeds overwhelm the aforementioned faults.
This was As I Lay Dying with an assassination attempt on Bob Marley substituted for Addie Bundren's funeral, and substituting an entire nation for a single family.
This book--this loose, baggy, occasionally digressive, bloody, scopic book--is a tour de force. What's more, it is a masterpiece.