Marlon James is a genius, but his ‘African Game of Thrones’ is ripe for parody
In 2015, I won a small bet with a publisher that Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings would win the Booker Prize. (He was a bit upset with me as one of his novels was also on the shortlist.) I hadn’t read the whole book – not by a long chalk – but I could tell it was going to be a winner for two main reasons: the quality of the prose, and the length. That “Brief” was an excellent joke. But judges are impressed by length. It denotes ambition, and seriousness of purpose.
One genre in which epic length is more or less obligatory is fantasy, and this is what James, a fan, is now committed to: this is the second volume in a proposed trilogy. The work in progress now stands at 1,200 pages in length, and I have a feeling that the next volume isn’t going to be a slim one.
The first instalment, 2019’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf, was rapturously received even by critics with a reputation for toughness. It was a vast, created and recreated mythology, set in an ancient but timeless Africa; a place magical and terrible, populated by demons, a liminal space between worlds, where nothing is necessarily as it seems.
When James said he wanted to create an African Game of Thrones I wondered at the time whether we even needed an English one. The Lord of the Rings has also been mentioned, and in wanting to create an African, specifically black African, mythology James is echoing Tolkien’s declared aim to create a pre-Christian English mythology. But the problem with James’s fantasy is that he makes it deliberately very hard for the reader. The language of The Lord of the Rings might have got starchier and more hifalutin as it went on, but at least everyone reading it knew what was happening.
There is little such certainty in James’s universe. The stories are told out of sequence; there are stories within stories, and dreams, and places that seem like dreamworlds but aren’t, and vice versa. The effect is at times like living through a fever, and if you have all the time in the world and are in the mood for this kind of thing, then you will probably like it very much. I got the distinct sense, halfway through Black Leopard, that a re-reading was probably going to be necessary – but life is too short, and I had to press on, as if through a trackless jungle. It is almost unparaphrasable; but I suspect it could be easily parodied.
And that is the real problem: it is hard to parody something that doesn’t take itself too seriously; but Black Leopard and Moon Witch take themselves very seriously indeed. Here is the paraphrase: the first volume deals with the hunt by a character known as Tracker, who is looking for a child; from the opening words of the novel – “The child is dead. There is nothing left to know” – you might wonder whether you, or Tracker, are on a fool’s errand.
Among various hostile encounters with a variety of people, shape-shifting beasts and demonic creatures either from James’s own imagination or African mythology (he picks and chooses from the cultures of the entire continent, as far as I can tell) he meets Sogolon, the Moon Witch; and in the second novel we hear events from her perspective. This is not immediately apparent. Here is the opening:
One night I was in the dream jungle. It was not a dream, but a memory that jump up in my sleep to usurp it. And in the dream memory is a girl. See the girl. The girl who live in the old termite hill. Her brothers three, who live in a big hut, say that the hill look like the rotting hut of a giant turn upside down, but she don’t know what any of that mean.
The rest of the book is, tonally, like that all the way through. The cumulative effect is mesmerising, undoubtedly powerful, and you can see why James felt he had to write it. But it is also like standing in the path of a fire hose: there’s no respite. James once tried to have his homosexuality exorcised by his Jamaican church: and you can see how these books, from their seeming unstoppability, could be another attempt to rid himself of other demons: there are so many of them here, from were-hyenas to vampiric animals to the Omozulu, roof-walking night demons of impossible antiquity (one of James’s inventions). There is an awful lot of carnage, both from the supernatural and natural worlds; it’s one damn thing after another.
I do not want to detract from James’s achievement, which is undeniable, as is his talent, which I might go so far as to call genius. But he asks a lot of his readers. He has told, in interviews, of others’ concern that this would be too fantastical for literary types and too literary for readers of fantasy. This is a legitimate concern. I think he has pulled off the balancing act, and the praise that’s been lavished on him is deserved. But at this point I shall wish him well, and bow out of the trilogy two-thirds of the way through.
Moon Witch, Spider King is published by Hamish Hamilton at ￡20. To order your copy for ￡16.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop
