Marlon James ‘geeks out’ audaciously
Booker Prize winner daringly enters the genre of fantasy novel with Black Leopard, Red Wolf
After winning the 2015 Man Booker Prize for “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” Jamaican-American writer Marlon James described his planned next work as an “African Game of Thrones,” promising that he was going to “geek the f—k out.” He certainly does.
“Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” the first volume of the Dark Star trilogy, is, as promised, a fantasy novel, but it’s far more daring and audacious than George R.R. Martin’s magnum opus, far more complex and rich.
It’s a profound reading experience. The ostensible plot of “Black Leopard, Red Wolf “seems straightforward enough: Tracker, who has the eye of a wolf (it’s a harrowing, grisly story) and a nose which allows him to find people even hundreds of miles away from a single whiff of their scent, is conscripted into a ragtag crew — including a witch, a minor deity, a shapechanger (the titular Leopard, with whom Tracker has a complicated history) and several others — and dispatched to find an abducted child. The exact nature of their quest, and of the child himself, isn’t clear from the outset, but they dutifully — and fitfully — set forth.
While that sounds like a fairly standard fantasy trope, there’s nothing straightforward about it. In James’ hands, the conventions of fantasy are twisted, reworked, and, at times, discarded. The book begins, for example, with a simple statement, “The child is dead. There is nothing left to know,” which simultaneously undercuts the narrative premise (the reader knows from the outset that the quest fails somehow, before they even see it begin) while raising the stakes for Tracker (who narrates the story from within a prison cell to an unseen and unheard inquisitor) and for the reader.
And that’s just the beginning. “Black Leopard, Red Wolf” is a fervent fever dream of a book, weaving together fantasy elements, mythology and history in a heady blend of voice, richly developed characters, layered and interwoven stories and shifting levels of reliability and reality.
It’s a complex book, and forces the reader to adopt an entirely new way of reading. “Black Leopard, Red Wolf” demands sustained attention — it isn’t a book that one can casually dip into — and full engagement, while simultaneously requiring the reader to surrender to the story itself. While readers are usually inclined to rationally, steadily engage with a narrative, attempting to put pieces together as they come, reading James is more akin to traditional oral storytelling (this is rooted, in part, in the prison-cell confession structure), requiring a trust that the storyteller will lead them where they need to go, despite seeming confusion and divergences. James doesn’t squander that faith, and the story ultimately comes to feel immediate and familiar, despite its strangeness and uncertainty.
If one allows themselves to be immersed in James’ world and words, they will emerge profoundly stirred, their understanding of the world, of the power of a novel, of the nature of reading itself, fundamentally changed.