But Who’s Counting?

A Brief History of Seven Killings a novel by Marlon James.  Riverhead Books.  688 pp. $17.00.  ****

I don’t know quite what to say about this novel, which I seem to have lived with for half my life (probably six weeks or so).  It’s a massive novel about gangs in Jamaica, also the CIA in Jamaica, also a reporter or two and a filmmaker, and gradually moves to the United States toward the end.  Its five sections are set in four distinct periods—1976, 1979, 1985, and 1991—and center around an attempted assassination of Bob Marley, who appears in the book only as the Singer, never by name.  It has a vast cast of characters, listed at the front; the list alone was enough to put me off from reading it, but it’s quite helpful.  I consulted it often to get back on track.

This is the most violent novel in recent memory[1].  More disturbing than the violence is the sheer disregard for life on the part of many prominent characters.  It’s nothing for one of these guys to torture somebody for a couple of hours and then kill him, and such scenes are sickening to read.  They wore me down.

I actually got bogged down in the middle of the book, and at one point thought of giving it up, something I almost never do.  But I prevailed, and once I got to the United States began to like people better (the same characters for the most part, just a little older).  I enjoyed the last third of the book more than the rest.

It won the Booker Prize in 2015.  And Marlon James is hugely talented.  He has talent coming out his ears.

A major fact about this book, and something a potential reader should know, is that it’s a novel of voices, some of which are easy to understand, some quite difficult.  I have a feeling that the book is a prizewinner largely because of its sheer virtuosity, though I have no idea if the voices are authentic.  Here, for instance, is a young gangster named Bam-Bam.

“Funnyboy say, Can you imagine, the little batty boy say him would suck me like some bow cat and mek me feel good if me make him live?  Dutty pervert all reach out and grab me wood.”

There’s a lot of wood in this novel.  Men get erections in various weird circumstances.

Here’s a gang leader named Papa-Lo.

“But when he tell me ‘bout the boys from Jungle, he tell me like a father who tell him son something too big for him to handle.  He know even before me know, that me couldn’t help him.  Me want you understand something good.  Me love that man to the max.  Me would take a bullet for the Singer.  But gentlemens, me can only take one.”

And here is a personal favorite, a woman who goes by different names in different sections, but at this point is Dorcas Palmer.

“Me just tell one nasty slut who was working with Miz Colthirst.  Nasty slut, me say, as long as you working for this here job and living under that there roof, you better lock up that pum-pum, you understand me?  Lock up the pum-pum.  Of course the bitch never listen so now she pregnant.  Of course Miz Colthirst have to let her go—on my recommendation of course.  Can you imagine?  Some little stinking bottom naigger pickney a run rapid ‘round the place?  On 5^th Avenue?  No, baba.  The white people would have one of them white people things, a conniption to rahtid.”

For a non-Jamaican like me, it was a relief to come across a narrator from the CIA, or the rather entertaining reporter from Rolling Stone.

At the end of the novel Marlon James writes an interesting page of Acknowledgements.  He said he had people doing research for him before he had any idea how he was going to make the material into a novel, because he didn’t know whose story it was.  Someone suggested it might not be one person’s story, and that he might read As I Lay Dying.  The suggestion is that Faulkner gave him the idea of the multiple narrators, and that opened the floodgates.

As I Lay Dying reads almost like a poem; it is remarkably brief (190 pages to this novel’s 688), and the monologues from different narrators build on one another and create a story that is much greater than the sum of its parts (and it includes my favorite chapter of all time, with Vardaman as the narrator.  “My mother is a fish.”).  In A Brief History, the narrators go on and on, especially in the middle of the book; they sometimes come at the same material from different angles, and the retellings began to wear me out.

Finally, though I marvel at Marlon James’ enormous talent, I’m not sure I see the point of the whole thing.  I now know more about Jamaica than I did, much more about gang life, I’ve heard the way in which our government may have been supporting the right-wing factions—no big surprise—and I’ve met some entertaining characters, especially the few women who show up.  There is a satisfying resolution in that the primary bad guy gets killed, along with several of his family members; we see once again that you can’t live this life without paying the price.  There’s no feeling that his death brings an end to things.  Somebody will take his place, and the spiral of violence will continue.

It is the Rolling Stone reporter who is writing an article called “A Brief History of Seven Killings.”  I don’t know how he picked seven from the multiple deaths we read about.

I assume the point is to show how dreadful gang life is.  I was convinced after Section One.

[1] War & Turpentine is sickeningly violent for a while, but it is describing a war, and is profoundly anti-war.