“It is probably the most violent novel to win the Booker,” Marlon James says, following his comment with a gust of laughter. You can delete that “probably”. James is no restrained Ian McEwan or Kazuo Ishiguro.
A Brief History of Seven Killings, which won the Man Booker prize this week, has an archly misleading title. There are many more than seven murders: the bodies pile up. Nor is it brief, weighing in at a mighty 686 blood-stained, often filthy-tongued pages.
James’s novel tells the story of the consequences of an unsuccessful plot to assassinate Bob Marley (always referred to as “The Singer”) in 1976. Who the gunmen were — and who ordered the hit and why — has never been properly established but it proves to be fertile ground for the Jamaican-born novelist’s imagination.
The result is an unruly, sweeping, bewildering, occasionally confusing novel, told from the perspective of dozens of characters — ghetto gangsters, coked-up teenage gunmen, a gay hitman, the ghost of a dead politician, a CIA agent, a “jive-talking” Rolling Stone music journalist, and so on. Though he has been likened to James Ellroy, it adds up to something very original and bracing. How many novels have an explicit gay sex scene told in Jamaican patois?
Was James fearful that all the blood, guts and swearing would frighten off readers? “I was worried all the time,” adding that “the technical aspects frightened me a lot more than the content”. He points to a nine-page long sentence, a chapter where the novel breaks out into free verse, and the thundering streams of consciousness. It’s ambitious stuff, even if not all the pyrotechnics fire to full effect.
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Despite gnawing doubts he remembered thinking he “wanted to write the novel in my head and not the novel that I think should be written, and to hell with everyone. The worse that can happen is my publishers [will] ask for their advance back.” So he wrote freely, telling himself “that I’ll leave that in until my editor takes it out”. The editor’s red pen did not strike out the difficult scenes, such as a massacre in a New York crackhouse.
James, who teaches literature at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota, says: “I had it drummed into me that violence [and sex] should be hinted at. For this novel, I realised I had to let go of all this.” He adds: “I get subtlety but sometimes understating and hinting off-stage is letting the reader off the hook . . . it’s great that you want to write about hinted sex, but I’m pretty sure that you’re not having hinted sex in real life.”
A fan of comic books, he has been likened to a Quentin Tarantino of the written word, but says: “I was not interested in stylised violence. I was very careful not to slip into a comic book idea, or a PG13 film idea of violence.”
Jamaica does not exactly have a reputation for being gay-friendly, and James has written about “whether it was in a plane or a coffin, I knew I had to get out of Jamaica.” He worried as a boy that a lisp or a limp wrist would betray his gayness. There is no trace of a lisp, though; his voice has a rich, Jamaican cadence — it’s a joy to hear him say the word “Plantagenet”. He’s a big guy with dreadlocks, a dramatic presence and a fast wit.
If he was still living on the island, where he was born in 1970, would he have written so explicitly about gay sex? “Probably. Would I have left [the scenes] in there? Probably not.” He does not play the gay martyr card. “For me to suffer reprisals for writing an explicit gay scene, would mean people would have to read it. I have no illusions, I am still a literary fiction author.” Last weekend, though, when I interviewed him on stage at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, he got a roar of laughter when he described the novel as a “sort of screw you Jamaica, you are going to read some serious man-man sex”.
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He seems to have an uneasy relationship with Jamaica, which he left in 2007. The Jamaican tourist board is unlikely to be whooping with joy at his tale of gangland murders, drug-running and political violence. His previous novel The Book of Night Women (2009) was a reminder of sugar plantation slavery, and his debut John Crow’s Devil (2005) featured religious mania and superstition. All in all, Jamaica does not appear as an easy-going, flip-flop-wearing tropical paradise.
“Jamaicans like to talk about Brand Jamaica . . . they say why is he degrading the country, why is he talking about more murders?” Jamaica in the 1970s certainly was a basketcase. On December 3, 1976, Marley was shot two days before he was due to perform at a “Smile Jamaica” concert. The event was supposed to ease the tensions between the two big political parties and their warring ghetto-gang supporters. “In the Seventies, a general election could bring the country to its knees. A huge section of the Jamaican population used to leave the country when an election was happening.”
So has the country improved? James points out that while elections now take place with barely a violent incident, and that there is a lot of “spunky creativity”, the “politics is just as bad, the corruption is just as corrupt, the economy is still in the tank, and we may very well be unfixable”.
So isn’t his novel bad for the island’s reputation? “The best thing to happen to Scandinavia’s [image in recent years] was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a scathing indictment of Scandinavian culture. There is a huge tourism industry that now wants to walk in Lisbeth Salander’s footsteps. People don’t read it as ‘Scandinavia must be so horrible that they kill people all the time’. They look it as a fertile ground for imagination and storytelling.”
James is writing the script for an HBO adaptation of A Brief History. So was his plan to write a hip, zeitgeisty novel? “I didn’t set out to write a cool thing, if you did you’d just end up with a hipster novel. I did want something that was street, a contemporary novel suffused with really cool music and musicians.”
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James has a reassuringly old-fashioned side, though. He grew up with Dickens (James wants to emulate the “rollercoaster” rides that the great Victorian put his readers through), the King James Bible and Shakespeare. His love for the playwright was inherited from his late father, who used to recite his soliloquies. All three of his novels have a Greek chorus too. James was no slum kid. His parents were police officers (his father became a lawyer, his mother a detective) and he grew up in the suburbs of Kingston.
James’s next project is very different. He has just finished the research stage of what has been dubbed an “African Game of Thrones”, drawing on the myths and history of central and western Africa. They “have this great imperial, royal history which is on a par with the Plantagenets and Tudors”. A Marlon James version of Hilary Mantel? It will have to be called Bring On The Bodies.