LITERARY FICTION
BLACK LEOPARD, RED WOLF by Marlon James
(Hamish Hamilton £20, 640 pp) AFTER Marlon James won the 2016 Man Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings, he reportedly told his agent he might follow it up with a ‘quiet, literary’ novel about Jamaicans in New York.
What he in fact produced was a literary, but not at all quiet, first instalment of a fantasy trilogy set in an ancient Africa which reads a bit like The Lord of the Rings crossed with Game of Thrones as conceived by Ben Okri, with a strong dollop of Marvel-style comic book thrown in.
On one level it’s a classic quest novel narrated by Tracker, an olfactory-blessed manhunter tasked with finding a missing boy; on another it’s an almost physically immersive summoning of a largely homoerotic and stupendously violent pan-African universe populated by psychopathic hyenas, witches, giants, mutilated children, mercenaries and a lusty leopard man with whom Tracker occasionally gets it on.
This is a relentlessly kinetic, hallucinatory myth mash-up that revels in generating thrills. Many readers will jump on it with glee but, alas, it defeated me.
THE SNAKES by Sadie Jones
(Chatto £14.99, 448 pp) SADIE JONES is such an enjoyable novelist to spend time with. Her books are so easy to read, while each sentence is rich in meaty observation.
Her fifth novel, the first to be set in the present day (although the previous four felt pretty contemporary in their fashion, too), is a slow-burning thriller about a very wealthy family whose money, it gradually transpires, is not entirely legit.
Their socialist daughter Bea is appalled by her father’s business approach and has rejected his lifestyle for one of impoverished happiness, living with her mixed-race husband Dan, a failed artist. Yet she finds herself drawn into her family’s murky finances after the death of her dropout brother, Alex, in France.
Elegantly atmospheric, this novel has echoes of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons in its portrait of greed and its unintended consequences. Sometimes it feels a bit top-heavy, yet Jones is excellent on the English obsession with status. While her denouement is risky, its abrupt swerve left me breathless.
LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE by Valeria Luiselli (4th Estate £16.99, 400 pp)
‘TO LEAVE is to die a little. To arrive is to never arrive,’ reads the migrant prayer that precedes this story of two opposing journeys.
One is a road trip south by two unhappily married documentary sound artists and their two children, from New York towards the Mexican border. The other is the perilous journey taken north by thousands of undocumented Central American children who hope to cross into the United States.
Interwoven is an imagined trip taken by a group of migrant children with an unnamed man across the desert, and the journey taken by the documentary couple’s young daughter and son, who decide on a whim to go in search of two missing Mexican girls.
Valeria Luiselli offers a searing indictment of America’s border policy in this roving and rather beautiful formbusting novel.
Among the tale’s many ruminative ideas about absences, vanished histories and bearing witness, it offers a powerful meditation on how best to tell a story when the subject of it is missing.