Keep an eye out for the Zogbanu

Sam Leith is surprised, and thrilled, to see a Man Booker winner going ‘full Hobbit’

When Kazuo Ishiguro published The Buried Giant in 2015, it was to a certain amount of consternation. Here was a literary novelist renowned for his feints and opacities, his dreamlike reimagining of the banalities and evasions and repressions of the English psyche, and here was… well, it was dreamlike all right, but it contained actual dragons, and actual ogres, and actual Sir Gawain, if you please. I wasn’t the only one to whisper anxiously: “Bloody hell. He’s gone full Hobbit.”

You can expect a similar reaction to Marlon James’s new one. James, who won the 2016 Man Booker prize for the astounding A Brief History of Seven Killings – which circled in its polyphonic way around the 1976 assassination attempt against Bob Marley – has gone full Hobbit with Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Full Hobbit, and then some. Here’s a vast fantasy novel, revelling in the genre, set in a phantasmagorical version of ancient Africa. It even has maps.

The signs, mind you, were always there. A Brief History was a series of tales told and retold, and the two figures at the heart of it had an archetypal force and grandeur to them: first Marley, who was only ever called “the Singer”; and then “Josey Wales”, who himself had lifted a quasimythological pseudonym.

When I interviewed James after his Man Booker win, I remember him grumbling (in a friendly enough way) that he tended to be asked a lot of not very interesting questions about Bob Marley, and that the best interviewer he’d had was someone who asked him about his devotion to Aeschylus.

James, then, is deeply interested in myth. And here he plunges in up to his ears. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a great thick bubbling feijoada of African myth and folklore. The cast of characters – like many a fat fantasy epic, it has a four-page dramatis personae in the front – will give you a flavour. It is a world of Tokoloshes (naughty poltergeists) and Mingi (children with birth abnormalities traditionally shunned by tribes in southern Ethiopia), of Impundulus (lightning birds) and Sangomas (witches). Not to mention the Ghommids and the Zogbanu and the Omoluzu and the Bultungi, none of which you’d like to meet on a dark night – let alone in the “Blood Swamp” or “Darklands”. “Asanbosam: monstrous eater of human flesh,” one entry tells us. “Amaki the Slippery: an elder nobody knows,” says another. My favourite is the entry for “The Mad Monkey”, which reads simply: “A deranged primate.” Jeepers, he must have had fun.

The effect, as some have said, is something like an African Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings – but there’s also a definite touch (for the videogame fan) of Witcher. At the heart of it is an old-fashioned quest narrative. Our protagonist is known only as Tracker, and, as his interlocutors repeatedly remind him, he is “said to have a nose”. That is, once he has a person’s

The Tropics (1910) by Henri Rousseau; right, Marlon James