MARLON JAMES’ STRANGE NEW WORLD
In his fourth novel, the award-winning author of ‘A Brief History of Seven Killings’ gives fantasy a dramatic reboot
They call him Tracker, a “hunter known by no other name” who, for the right price, will find anyone you need found. Once upon a time, this mysterious figure tells his jailhouse inquisitor, he was hired to join a group of nine and track down a boy who’d mysteriously gone missing. Readers of Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Marlon James’ dizzying new novel, already know the case does not end well: “The child is dead. There is nothing left to know,” he informs us in the book’s first two lines. The second statement, however, is a lie. This antihero proceeds to recount a long, perilous journey through a mythical land that could be the African continent in ancient times. Or it could be in another dimension altogether, one in which men with magical wolf eyes, giant creatures named Ogos, evil ceiling-walking spirits, river demons, zombies, a shape-shifting leopard with a taste for sodomy and a spider king are the norm.
Pulling from folklore, fables and a host of fantasy novels from the not-so-distant past, James’ follow-up to his critically lauded A Brief History of Seven Killings is geared toward those who prefer broadsword battles over Bob Marley’s life story. He trades in the patois of his beautifully sprawling look at 1970s Jamaican politics and reggae superstars in favor of dollops of faux-Middle-earth speak (“She is Sogolon, master of the ten and nine doors”) and a variation on tough-guy banter associated with pulp gumshoes and flatfoots.
But more important, James is utilizing his gift for lush prose not just in the name of world-building but also as a way of reinventing the grand genre epic. He jokingly compared this book to “an African Game of Thrones” last year, a quotable line from a self-proclaimed hardcore fantasy-lit nerd. But if anything, James has concocted a Tolkienesque tale that feels steeped in specific mythologies, superstitions, old wives’ tales and oral storytelling traditions.
Like many of his fantasy-novel predecessors, he’s packed enough cup-runneth-over plot in the tome’s 600-plus pages to fill several trilogies (this is the first in a series of three planned installments). Yet James never makes you sense he’s come anywhere near the limits of where he can take this antihero, those creatures or the kingdoms that Tracker and
Co. violently slash through. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a claim-staking move, a chance for the author to leave his mark on a sword-and-sorcery template not usually associated with Man Booker Prize winners. The well of James’ imagination here feels virtually bottomless. You put it down word-drunk yet somehow thirsty for more.