Marlon James begins a dreamlike African epic in ‘Black Leopard, Red Wolf ’
African fantasy has made a huge splash in the past several years. Nnedi Okorafor and Tomi Adeyemi have helped reconfigure the genre away from Western traditions and into new and exciting territory for many readers. Now comes Marlon James and his epic novel “Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” which will surely redefine fantasy for many years to come.
The book is the first of a planned trilogy that will examine the monumental events from different characters’ perspectives. It follows the adventures of a young man named Tracker, who is gifted with superhuman powers of scent, as well as a magic eye. He and his shapeshifting frenemy Leopard are hired along with a host of other misfits to track down a missing child who may or may not hold the fate of their world in his hands.
On the surface, it’s pretty typical adventure stuff, but the bones of the plot do not in any way capture the strange wonder that is “Black Leopard.” Tracker is no chosen one on a noble quest. He goes out of his way quite frequently to admit he has no idea why he’s on this journey that concerns the highest politics of this fantasy Africa. He’s a creature of sex and blood who fled from a broken home and an even more broken society looking for carnal satisfaction while hunting for profit. He’s a truly flawed hero who navigates through monsters both human and inhuman simply because it pleases him to thwart the system.
Where James is truly brilliant as an author is how he crafts this dreamlike world where fantasy is both mad and mundane. It’s like “Game of Thrones” if it had been written by Mark Z. Danielewski. It takes some getting used to, but you find yourself, like Tracker, accepting children made of smoke, fish you can ride on and demons that walk the ceiling as they hunt blood. There’s no awe to the phantasmagoria. James allows his characters to show contempt for the uncanny, treating them as products of his tainted kingdoms rather than legends. It adds to oft-time nightmarish tone of the book.
“One of the key aspects of African storytelling is that it’s the trickster that tells the story,” James says. “It’s a big difference from Western storytelling because the storyteller has authority because we believe they know. That it’s truth. We have this weird relationship to the truth in Western culture. We have the authorized edition, the definitive edition, the author’s preferred edition. In African storytelling, that’s thrown out in the very beginning. We know the storyteller is an unreliable narrator. It’s the reader’s job to decide the truth, not the character’s job to prove.”
As the novel weaves in and out of fantastic kingdoms where a few good people struggle against their corrupted rulers, Tracker finds himself realizing the strength of love and trust in a world that often actively punishes relying on others. It takes him ages to get there, but even a cynical mercenary proves open to forgiveness and family despite a lifetime of betrayal. If you have ever charged in to rescue someone while still bleeding from the wounds they inflicted on you, you will find a piece of yourself in Tracker as he searches. There’s a comforting banality to him and his adventures that makes him rare among fantasy protagonists. No matter how bizarre, he keeps walking through it shouting curses at the gods, swinging hatchets and fornicating.
“As dreamlike as it might be, for the characters it’s real,” James says. “The one thing you don’t want to do when you’re writing something strange and out of the world is have the characters also seem to be in awe of it. For the characters, the world isn’t a fantasy. The world is the world.”