MARLON JAMES

X marks the spot: how a Booker winner found his way to fantasy

WHEN MARLON JAMES CHOSE TO follow up his Booker-winning A Brief History Of Seven Killings with a fantasy trilogy, there was some surprise within parts of the literary establishment. But talk to the man himself and one of the reasons for this choice couldn’t come through more clearly. “There are some very, very simple and basic reasons why fantasy,” he says, his accent Jamaican despite the fact he now lives in the USA. “I like magic. I like witches. I like goblins and demons, and I like fairies!”

There was another reason for choosing fantasy.

“I became fascinated and consumed with African mythology, early religion and early history,” he explains. “The fantasy novels almost happened as an outgrowth of that.”

Whatever the motivations, be glad that James did choose to write his Dark Star trilogy – the second volume of which is now arriving – as his take on the form is unique. For a start, there’s the books’ timeline. Both Moon Witch, Spider King and its predecessor Black Leopard, Red Wolf tell essentially the same story, centred on the search for a missing boy – as will the third book. It’s an approach James explains by referencing Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film that offers different takes on the same events.

This puts the question of who we as readers believe at the centre of the books. “You and I may walk into a room and see somebody gobbling a pizza, and you may think he’s gluttonous and I might think he’s starving,” says James. “And in a way that ties into a very kind of African folk storytelling [tradition], where truth is not a given.”

X APPEAL

This approach might easily become tricksy. That it doesn’t, despite the first two books having different styles – Black Leopard is a dense, violent and twisting quest novel; Moon Witch, centred on 177-year-old witch Sogolon, has something of the deceptive surface lightness of Toni Morrison’s work – says much about James’s skill as a novelist.

“There’s always been some sort of element of the unreal or surreal in everything I’ve written,” he says. “The first time I read magical realism, I read Gabriel García Márquez [One Hundred Years Of Solitude] and it is one of the first times fiction actually made sense to me – the idea of living with the unexplained or the unexplainable, and just taking it for granted that this is the way the world is.”

James grew up in Jamaica, the son of middle-class parents living in an affluent suburb of Kingston. He’s spoken often over the years about the difficulties of his childhood. Gay, he didn’t come out until he left for the USA, where he now divides his time between writing and teaching creative writing and literature to undergraduates in St Paul, Minnesota.

He was a geeky child and bullied, and he turned to fantastic fiction as a way to make sense of the world. The X-men were especially important to him. “It certainly didn’t pass me by that I wrote a novel [Black Leopard] about a team of superpowered people,” he says.

Meeting X-men writer Chris Claremont was “one of the highlights” of his life, so important were the comics to him. Of those who felt – and feel – like him, he says, “A lot of us were nerds, and were picked on in high school, prep school, whatever. And a bunch of outcasts trying to save a world that didn’t like them resonated – certainly for me, when I’m doing the cool kid’s homework and thinking I’m their friend, only to realise I’m not. I remember that happened and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I really am a mutant!’”

COMING TO AMERICA

Early on, he knew he wanted to be a writer, but it was tough to get published. James’s first novel, 2005’s John Crow’s Devil, was rejected 78 times (“not that I’m counting”) before it found a publisher. The difficulty of getting attention for his work played into his decision to leave Jamaica, which has been attributed in several profiles to his sexuality. “Queerness has something to do with that,” he says of the decision, “but I think sometimes people overplay it, when a lot of it was, ‘How do I just, hell, make a living as a writer?’”

The Booker win for Seven Killings, a novel that explored the attempted 1976 assassination of Bob Marley in Jamaica and its aftermath from multiple viewpoints, changed this. “The cool thing about being book-famous,” he says, “is not that you’re famous, you’re just not anonymous.”

William Gibson once told SFX something similar, describing the way his “lizard brain” performed somersaults when he met Mick Jagger. James immediately identifies with this story. “I have a Bono moment like that,” he says. “He’s in Minneapolis and he’s like, ‘Let’s jump in my car and let’s talk’. ‘Sure, let’s talk, Bono’. And I’m like, ‘Fuck, I’m talking to Bono about Prince!’”

Moon Witch, Spider King is published by Hamish Hamilton on 3 March.

I like magic. I like witches. I like goblins and demons, and I like fairies