KEEP AN OPEN MIND
Marlon James’ new fantasy novel does away with many of the genre’s tropes,
Marlon James is busy these days. We’re talking — one of many, many interviews he’s doing — on the occasion of the publication of his fourth book, Black Leopard Red Wolf.
“I don’t think one-tenth as many people cared about following up my second novel so much,” he quips. But that was before his widespread fame-inducing 2015 Booker Prize win for his third novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings. Black Leopard Red Wolf is the first book in a planned fantasy trilogy called Dark Star. While pre-publication hype has called it an African Game of Thrones, James laughs at the idea. “Somebody asked me if I just wrote a Game of Thrones with brown people. Brown people are already in Game of Thrones!”
What it is is a rollicking fantasy novel, with an incredibly detailed, (“you should be smelling it, touching it, tasting it”) fully realized world informed by African mythology and folklore. The basic plot: A mercenary named Tracker sets out, with a ragtag crew including a shapeshifter and a witch, in search of a missing child. James states at the outset that “The child is dead, there is nothing left to know,” which at the outset turns on its head the idea of a regular quest story.
James almost makes it a point to do away with the usual signposts or tropes. And so it’s the kind of book you have to approach with an open mind. Where you must leave your preconceived notions behind and surrender to the world the author’s created.
“I think even when we read literature from different nations or cultures or nationalities we’re still expecting it to be Western,” James notes.
“We’re still expecting a little spoon feeding. We’re still expecting that in some ways, at best, it’s a sort of what we think of as a universal novel. And (usually) that universe is just European. Or we expected, at worst, a kind of literary brownface where all the signifiers that ensures that we’re in sci-fi or in fantasy or in a historical novel are there, everyone is just brown.”
Plus, he says, we love books from David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon “puzzle books from those big white guys, right? Why should they have all the fun?” While he says he doesn’t think of himself as a political writer, he looks at how and when fantasy is created.
“Usually my theory is that we turn to fantasy when we’re trying to explain the unexplainable,” he says, noting that Tolkien was still reeling from World War I when he wrote Lord of the Rings. While we’re now in the infancy of a new century, “it’s as if all the achievements have been rolled back. We have people marching, saying Jews Will Not Replace Us. What is that all about?” Black Leopard Red Tiger is a big, sweeping book, biblical in its scope — although James said he didn’t reread the Bible, but did reread The Odyssey as part of his research. The Greek myths. The Roman myths. Folklore that most of us in the West take for granted; that informs the core of our beliefs about human nature.
“If you’re European or European descended, you know everything from Grimm’s Fairy Tales to the Icelandic sagas, the Norse myths and all of that. There is a sort of knowledge you have of yourself as a people that the myths provide,” James says.
“So there’s that sort of bedrock that people of European descent have that as a person like me growing up in Jamaica I didn’t have. And I’m realizing what kind of overall sort of psyche I missed out on because I never had that bedrock. All of my origin stories were European.”
So in one way the idea for the trilogy has “always been percolating.” But, he says, while he’d always been interested in African folklore, he knew that he didn’t know enough.
“I remember being told stories by my grandfather … Anansi stories were something you passed around on the playground. So the oral tradition was still there and still strong. That’s one thing the colonizers couldn’t suppress,” he says.
He knew there was more and set out to fact-find. Which meant digging into historical, literary and anthropological works. “I wasn’t trying to replicate them, but I wanted to use it as this sort of reservoir of ideas that I could just pull from, and also add my stuff to it and make something hopefully new out of it.”
Those written works had their limitations.
“I also had to be very aware of biases. Reading African history even up to the ’50s was, for me, hilarious. It would have been infuriating if it hadn’t been so hilarious picking up the glaring racism in a lot of these texts,” James says.
In A Brief History, James presented a cast of about 75 characters at the beginning of the book. He does the same with this one: providing a list of characters who appear in different parts, and maps of the various lands, where The Blood Swamp is near to the Uwomowomowo- mowo Valley, with lakes holding dragon icons in between. “I also write to discover what I want to write. So a lot those maps arose as I needed them.”
“The trick with sci-fi, fantasy, speculative is that I have to write about imagined places as if people have always lived there.”
Which is kind of ironic, given that, while reading Black Leopard Red Wolf, you sometimes have no idea where you are, or where you’re going. Then there’s something of a philosophical issue James has with authoritative narrators. You have to give yourself over to his world, yes, but sometimes he leaves you swimming in a world you’re not familiar with. This, of course, is entirely intentional.
“In a lot of African folk tales, in a lot of African storytelling, one of the things that’s radically different from the West is that we (in the West) automatically assume the storyteller has authority.
“We kind of question it now, but if you go back to even Victorian times, you read something like Elizabeth Gaskell. Elizabeth Gaskell is writing it from the point of view of ‘I’m telling the story so clearly you’re listening to me.’”
No such assumption is made of the African storyteller.
“You know from the get-go that the Trickster is telling the story. So Africans never have to be taught unreliable narrator in Lit class. They already know … so you already know that you have to take the story with a grain of salt. You already know that truth now becomes something you’re going to have to investigate and define.”
The final two books in the trilogy will tell the story from other points of view, including one of the characters, Sogolon, who “comes off very badly” in this initial book.
It’ll also put that character in a unique position. As she’ll get to tell the tale, “she’s clearly going to have to justify her choices.” But, equally, the reader’s going to have to figure out who they think is telling the truth.
“I actually am throwing the reader in a crisis. Because they’re going to have to choose who’s telling the truth. I’m not going to tell them,” he says. “I’m totally throwing the moral choice to the reader. Good luuuuuck.”
It’s both playful and diabolical — we believe the voices we want to believe, the points of view we want to believe, the stories we want to believe.
“Reader, you got some work to do. And what you decide will say a lot about you.” He laughs. “I can already see the posts on Reddit.”