Marlon James's new novel, longlisted for this year's Booker prize, is a polyphonic 640-page epic that mounts a grisly exposé of Jamaican homophobia. Set in Aids-era Kingston, the narrative roves “uptown, downtown, ghetto and gully” with excursions to 1950s England and a closing leap to 2000s United States.
A gruesome mob attack defines the plot
The novel's defining event is a mob attack on eight queer men who have clandestinely gathered to stage John Herbert's 1967 gay prison play, Fortune and Men's Eyes. The goal, in the words of director Havelock Titus, is to shatter “the whole fragile myth of Jamaican male sexuality”.
The men's banter, fears and motivations are relayed by actor Eddy Porteous, a “white-ish” Belgian Jamaican college student. His diary entries over the month preceding the assault illuminate the interplay of class, race and colourism in Jamaican queerness.
Inside the perpetrators' minds
The narrative then thrusts readers into the minds of the attackers, including a policeman, a self-loathing closet case, a deacon and a reggae singer named Streggeh Don. Violence is a hallmark of James's fiction, from The Book of Night Women to A Brief History of Seven Killings.
One man dies after a branch is shoved into his anus; another has both eyes gouged out. All but Eddy, who skipped rehearsal, are maimed. Two later vanish. Eddy teams up with fellow actor Jordan, the novel's beating heart, to find them.
Survivor's guilt and the Aids epidemic
Jordan and Eddy's journeys are recounted in interview transcripts with an American journalist. Their frustrations gather poignancy within the broader tragedy of the Aids epidemic: “This is what Aids is after all, isn't it? One long set of disappearing acts.”
The novel is a bleak exploration of rage, survival, trauma and revenge. It obsesses over whether meaning can emerge from atrocity, and whether the disappeared might not want to be found.
The formal design has flaws: the narrative sags in places, and intertextuality can veer into pastiche. But these are redeemable shortcomings. James's prose is a consistent triumph: bitter, hilarious, lyrical, bawdy and “scorchingly, ravishingly queer”. The Booker judges have called it a “reckoning”; it is also a haunting.
