THE first literary dish served up by Marlon James was described as a “Jamaican stew spicier than jerk chicken”. Last week his third novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings — a 688-page saga mostly written in Jamaican patois, woven around the attempted assassination of the reggae star Bob Marley — was the surprise winner of the Man Booker prize. The judges called it “an all-enveloping, almost suffocating immersion in violence, fear, intimidation, sun-baked poverty, politics and drugs”.
James, 44, who sees himself as an “old-fashioned” Dickensian writer, was astonished that his immensely long novel had won such an accolade. When he was asked what he was going to do with the £50,000 prize, he said he had “no plans” as it hadn’t occurred to him he would win. That’s understandable: his first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was turned down 78 times and James was reduced to destroying the manuscript in despair.
Financial success is now bound to come his way. The Jamaican-born author has already won the Anisfield-Wolf award — sometimes called the “black Pulitzer” — for A Brief History. On the back of the Booker he saw a “huge” jump in his online sales figures overnight. His first novel — it survived — is due be published in Britain next month; his second, The Book of Night Women, went into print in the UK last October.
All three books have been optioned for screen adaptations. His dream cast for A Brief History would include Idris Elba as a gangster, Naomie Harris playing the female lead and for the gangland don, Papa-Lo, “a black version of Timothy Spall”.
Some have been left queasy by James’s unflinching portrait of Jamaica’s underbelly in A Brief History. Michael Wood, chairman of the judging panel — which also included the author Frances Osborne, who is married to the chancellor of the exchequer — said his mother would not get past “the first few pages” because of the swearing. James banned his own mother from reading the last section of the book because of its sexual content.
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One critic, while acknowledging that A Brief History “is written with an extraordinary, carbonated energy that fizzes and fizzes and fizzes”, said it was not the best but the most horrible book of the year: “I started to struggle on page two with the description of a corpse with a head ‘like a smashed pumpkin’ and flinched again on page three at the account of ropes tied so tight around a man’s hands that the skin had been worn away until it bled.”
The action ranges over three decades but revolves around Marley, who became embroiled in Jamaican politics in the 1970s when the island was a political and social basket case. A gang of gunmen tried to kill him days before he was due to appear at a peace concert in 1976. “I’d read about the men who tried to kill him and how a lot of them were systematically executed, how some of them vanished, how mystically and strangely their lives turned out,” James said last week. “Growing up in Jamaica, you are used to gaps in history, to half the story. I just became seduced by the idea of those men.”
James says Marley was such a huge figure in Jamaica that he had become a kind of fable. When he went to write the star’s name “it felt wrong. I wanted the Marley I knew. And the fact is, the Marley I knew is not a real person.” In A Brief History, consequently, Marley appears simply as “The Singer”.
Although the narrative explores what might have happened to those involved in the plot to kill him, the cast of characters extends beyond the gangsters to ghetto dwellers, journalists and drug barons. James says he has modelled his writing on that of Charles Dickens: “I consider myself a Dickensian in as much as there are aspects of storytelling I still believe in — plot, surprise, cliffhangers. I still believe you should make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait. In many ways I am an old-fashioned novelist.”
There’s nothing old-fashioned about his attitude to graphic sex and violence: “I think violence should be written the same way I believe explicit sex should be written. Someone said to me that if I just show the desire, I wouldn’t have to write the sex. I thought, ‘What do you mean? Is this your Anglo-Saxon puritanism speaking?’ Why can’t the visceral serve in fiction? Why sanitise a visceral experience? I don’t believe in PG violence; neither do I believe in pornographic violence. If I have written 10 episodes of violence, I have not failed if you are shocked every single time. But if by the fifth time you are desensitised, and then numbed, I have failed. It needs to shock you every time.”
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In contrast to the world of his novel, James’s own life could barely be less bloody. For the past eight years he has taught creative writing at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota. His upbringing was “so suburban it was almost disappointing”. He was one of four children brought up in a big house in Portmore, an affluent suburb of Kingston. His mother was a police detective, his father a lawyer. “The family joke was that my mom locked up criminals and my dad got them out,” he said. His father, whom he describes as “busy”, also had four children from other relationships.
James was six when the attempt was made on Marley’s life: “I like to think I was a pretty smart six. I certainly knew what a criminal was. I certainly knew what a gunman was.” But what most struck him was his parents’ reaction, their fear that the assassination attempt would trigger even more political violence, the look of uncertainty on their faces as they asked themselves: “What is going to happen?”
At Wolmer’s Boys, Jamaica’s oldest school, James was a “nerd”, into reading and art rather than sport. The other boys sensed he was gay and he was relentlessly bullied. They called him a “batty boy” (Jamaican slang for a homosexual), which was more than a playground insult. Homosexual “acts of gross indecency” are illegal in Jamaica, carrying a sentence of up to 10 years’ hard labour. James has written that the only reason he survived school was “my cowardice about suicide”.
He did not come out publicly until earlier this year when he wrote a moving account of his early life for The New York Times: “I bought myself protection by cursing, locking my lisp behind gritted teeth, folding away my limp wrist and drawing 36-double-D girls for art class. I took a copy of Penthouse to school to score cool points, but the other boys called me ‘batty boy’ anyway — every day, five days a week. To save my older, cooler brother, I pretended we weren’t related.”
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Home was a sanctuary, the place where he would have“Shakespeare duels” with his father. “He’d just start something and I’d be, ‘I can top that’. Usually we’d be in his bedroom, or listening to Mozart. Julius Caesar was his favourite, so he’d go into ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ and I would be, ‘Whatever’ and hit back with Coriolanus.” His father died in 2012 before James achieved literary recognition.
His life began to change at the University of the West Indies, but he was still in denial about his sexuality, sometimes dating girls. After college, however, he went to work in advertising: “The entrance to my cubicle was blocked by a boss with curious eyebrows who asked why all my magazines showed men on the covers, what GQ meant, where was Playboy? Every man in the office had a woman on the side, whether he was married or not, and even monogamous men were considered gay. Memories of childhood returned as nightmares: I was a kid again, frightened by school, praying to God every night, please let me wake up in another body.”
He left Jamaica for good in his mid-thirties to study for a master’s degree at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania, graduating in 2006. Literary success was elusive, though. After the 78th rejection of John Crow’s Devil, which chronicles a “biblical struggle” in a Jamaican village, James snapped. Melodramatically he deleted the manuscript from his laptop and “went to all my friends’ houses and took it off their computers too. Erased every trace of it. I just thought if so many people thought this was not good, it couldn’t possibly be good. Maybe I wasn’t meant to be a writer.”
He might well have gone undiscovered but for a chance meeting with the American novelist Kaylie Jones at Jamaica’s Calabash literary festival. Having talked to him, she wanted to read John Crow’s Devil. James found that, despite his purge, it had survived in his email outbox. She loved it and found him an agent. The rest is (a brief) history.