The best book of the year? No, the most HORRIBLE
Readers of a nervous disposition should not start Marlon James’s a Brief History of seven Killings at the beginning, but at the end. There, in the list of acknowledgements, James — who was awarded the Man Booker Prize for Fiction this week — includes a warning: ‘Maybe my mother should stay away from part four of the book’.
If Mrs James managed to get as far as part four without having an attack of the vapours then she has a stronger constitution than I do. I started to struggle on page two with the description of a corpse with a head ‘like a smashed pumpkin’.
I flinched again on page three at the account of ropes tied so tight around a man’s hands that the skin had been worn away until it bled. and I was all but finished off when, on page four, the same man chokes on his own blood after his nose is smashed with a rock.
In trying to work out why the Booker judges chose seven Killings as their winner, I ought perhaps to start with the positives. James’s vast, 686-page book about gang rivalries in Jamaica in the seventies and the attempted murder of the reggae singer Bob Marley is written with an extraordinary, carbonated energy. It fizzes and fizzes and fizzes and periodically explodes into pandemonium and violence.
The writing races ahead, high on adrenaline, testosterone, fear, fury and cocaine. Its nervy stamina is a tour de force, and James at the very least deserves a medal for keeping up this feverish pace with scarcely a pause for breath.
But, style aside, it is a horrible book. It is unrelentingly nasty, brutish — and much too long.
The piling of violence on violence turns the stomach. On page eight, a young boy watches his mother, a prostitute, see to her clients, before his father beats her ‘like a dog’. On page 12, the boy’s father assaults his mother with a broomstick.
On page 13, the father is forced to perform a sex act on another man at gunpoint. On page 14 . . . but enough.
after the first 100 pages — and if I were not a book reviewer, I would have given up after page 13 — I had to put the book down and go outside for some fresh air.
I felt depressed and sullied byy what I had read. as I walked, I felt increasingly angry.
Is this really the ‘finest’ work of fiction published this year? Is this what we should race to the bookshops to buy?
The six Booker Prize judges were unanimous in their choice. Their chair, historian Michael Wood, said: ‘It just dawned on us that this was the book. It was full of surprises, the language, many, many voices.’
He did, however, add: ‘ My mother would not have got beyond the first few pages, because of the swearing.’
The swearing is the least of it. I could quote you atrocities and obscenities from almost every page. a number of reviewers have likened seven Killings to the ultra-violent films of Quentin Tarantino, the man behind Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. I can certainly imagine Tarantino putting in his bid for the film rights.
as I laboured on, increasingly discomfited, I thought of a recent conversation with a friend. He’d asked me what I look for in a book. ‘ a happy ending,’ I answered truthfully.
He was incredulous. didn’t I want to be challenged or unnerved? didn’t I want my preconceptionsti shakenhk andd bomb-blasted to shrapnel? No, not really. as I read the newspapers each morning and listen to the news, my day i s punctuated by bulletins about the barbarity of IsIs in the Middle east, blameless toddlers drowned in the Mediterranean and misery and suffering in refugee camps, famines and disaster zones. I
I felt depressed and sullied by what I’d read
am not such a delicate flower that I shut myself off from the realities of the world but, like many people, when I get into bed at night with a book, I crave something uplifting, funny, beautifully told, and, ideally, with a happy ending.
Never more so than at this time of year when it is dark at tea-time and long nights of reading lie ahead. I suspect my lis list of requirements is shared by many other readers. Mightn’t theh Booker judges steer us to towards something more likely to appeal?
T The other books on the shortlis list weren’t much more temptin ing. The bookies’ favourite, Hanya Yanagihara’s a little li life, took child sex abuse as its su subject. Others focused on de dementia and illegal immigr grants’ trials in sheffield.
WhatW is so dispiriting about sevense Killings i s that i ts r re emorseless nastiness is notno relieved by any wit, tendernessne or joy. There is only aggression,sio only cruelty — for nearly 70070 pages.
ByB no means do I insist on a boycottbo on all violence in books. Think,Th for example, of the night in Charles dickens’s Oliver TwistTw when Bill sikes murders Nancy,Na beating her with a club andan sitting until dawn watching theth blood seep from her body.
It is a dire and awful scene but it is isolated, and all the more shocking for it. elsewhere in the book there is pathos, kindness, humour, warmth and, yes, for Oliver at least, a happy ending.
The great pleasure of dickens is that while there may be agonies, excursions and tearful deathbed scenes along the way, by and large, in the final chapters, the goodies win, the baddies lose, the penniless hero inherits a fortune and the church bells ring.
It has become fashionable to deride Jane austen for her novels that end at the altar, but I for one love a good literary wedding. elizabeth and darcy. Jane and Bingley. emma and Knightley. Hip hip hooray!
When I look at my book shelves, I see a notable dearth of gangland violence, drug trafficking, murder, arson and rape, and a preponderance of weddings, country house parties, wry butlers and general jollity.
do you remember the song donald O’Connor so charmingly sings in the musical singin’ in the rain? I have just watched it again on YouTube and it has cheered me up no end after seven Killings. ‘Make ’em laugh, make ’em laugh,’ O’Connor urges, ‘don’t you know everyone wants to laugh?’
It is sound advice: advice contemporary authors and next year’s Booker Prize judges might bear in mind.
There are authors I return to again and again — when I have a cold, when I am tired and run down, when the weather is dismal — because I know that within a few pages I’ll feel the edges of my lips twitching into a smile. There is stella Gibbons
There’s a lot to be said for happy ever after
of Cold Comfort Farm fame; evelyn Waugh (forget Brideshead revisited and read scoop, about a hapless nature writer mistaken for a war correspondent and sent to cover ‘ a very promising little war’ in east africa ); PG Wodehouse for Jeeves and Blandings; Gerald durrell for his menagerie of pets remembered in My Family and Other animals; Nancy Mitford for her particular brand of romantic cynicism; and Kingsley amis for lucky Jim.
There are few set pieces so funny as Jim’s hungover attempt to remedy the damage done by burning a cigarette hole through his hostess’s sheets.
When you get to the bit where he washes his hair with a watersoaked nailbrush, you can’t help but snort with laughter.
Poor Jim. These books might not meet with the approval of the modern generation Booker Prize judges, but when it comes to pleasurable reading, there is a great deal to be said for a comic turn by Mrs Bennet, a cocktail mixed by Jeeves and a happily ever after.