A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

*contains spoilers*


As any experienced reader will tell you, one should never put too much stock in the title of a book. In many cases, it can simply be a label by which a work may be known and catalogued henceforth, as opposed to an encapsulation of the tangled threads encased in its covers. Whilst much could be said on this subject, the main point here is that A Brief History of Seven Killings is neither brief nor just a book about only seven killings – there are seven killings, and it can in places be brief, but on the whole it is so much more in both respects.


James starts us off in Jamaica in 1976, and one can gauge quite vividly the attitudes of the time, place and culture simply through the way those of Kingston speak of their greatest export, Bob Marley; “Nobody who kill a police is going to hell but is something else to kill the Singer.” Marley’s power and influence over not just Kingston but the thousands of people who inhabit and are drawn to Jamaica from all over the world is made apparent in James’s reference to him plainly as the Singer: a proper noun that doesn’t so much as imply as it proclaims that Marley is one of a kind – like a chosen one he is beheld with the reverence of the likes of Jesus finally returning to bestow peace upon the warring political factions and the poverty-stricken alike.


As you may be able to tell from the quote above, many of the book’s characters speak in the Jamaican vernacular, which can to the untrained eye/ear make a heavy impact on the tone of a particular utterance. In some cases the violence hinted at or explained can have a candidly chilling effect, in others a fantastically comical one – when the syntax and ellipsis is just right; “I’ve heard ‘Dancing Queen’ so much I can feel myself turning fag.” Such honesty in the speeches of these complicated characters is refreshingly authentic, which gives each act of violence great power when it does occur. Indeed, in the middle of the book it becomes a difficult prospect not to become normalised to the whirlwind of violence, which is an everyday prospect of life in the dangerous downtown slums of Kingston. But, believe it or not, the violence hits hardest when it is referred back to, once certain characters are extricated from the whirlwind and placed in the relatively safe haven of Brooklyn in the 1990s; “Oh Lord is right…Can you imagine, nothing happen when they kill the girl, but them kill the boy and Kingston erupt with wildfire. What a thing.” In the comparative neutrality of a U.S. hospital, the violence, particularly to the women of Kingston, becomes an absurd prospect – nauseatingly dark and borderline-unfathomable.


Indeed, the frustration of the violence against not just an oppressed people, but an oppressed gender within an oppressed people, is given an angry and righteous voice with the character of Nina Burgess; “I’m getting just a little sick and tired of every man including now my damn father feeling that as soon as they see me they get license to be on their worst behaviour.” Even as she runs away from the predatory men of Kingston, who consider rape and the effects of it on women as tantamount to petty theft, there is no real refuge for Nina, no place to hide and nowhere to feel secure and just live; “…and if the embassy did just give me the bombopussy r’asscloth VISA…like me would want to run away to the fucking country where Son of Sam shooting people in the head and big man raping little boys and white people still calling people nigger and trying to stab them with a flagpole in Boston…they have another fucking thing coming.” If there is a stable core to this book, it is Nina, in whatever name she gives herself.


As the (almost-a-hundred) characters speak in such a direct tone to the reader, almost as though an interview with their unfiltered thoughts were taking place in the reading, the complexities in the narrative beautifully reflect the chaos of the lives and deaths of those we come to love and hate. One character in particular, the embarrassingly uncool Alex Pierce, a writer for the then music-orientated Rolling Stone magazine, places these complexities before James’s readers (as well as the Storm Posse members who are intent on making him fear for his life) as he stands there in his pee-stained tighty-whities; “Shit doesn’t just happen in a void,” he explains in a surprisingly cool moment considering the situation, “there’re ripples and consequences and even with all that there’s still a whole fucking world going on, whether you’re doing something or not.” This novel is most certainly doing something, even if I don’t fully know what that is yet. There’s just so much to think about...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Chouans by Honoré de Balzac

*contains spoilers* The Chouans , the first of Honoré de Balzac’s many contributions to his panoramic narrative world, latterly titled La Comédie Humaine , should have been the text with which I began my likely long adventure through this author’s works. On a whim of sorts, I read Cousin Bette (1847), unaware of its place in the corpus; and then, once cognisant of the galactic extent of La Comédie Humaine , and as a way for me to gain a surer footing going forwards, I moved on to Père Goriot (1835), which appears towards the front end of the narrative arc. One constraint that exists at the outset for those readers who cannot speak nor indeed read French is that of accessibility to the words on the page in one’s given language. Considering the wealth of material to-hand, examples of translators either willing or able to step forwards to build those bridges over the last two centuries, and thus allow readers of other languages entry into the afterlife of the original texts (Walter Benj...
Read more

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver

*contains spoilers* ‘The ruin gives absence, so to speak, a material dwelling: a rock-solid site that, paradoxically, embodies a sense that the world is also porous, uncertain, and insubstantial.’ David B. Morris. I have to say from the outset that I wrote more notes during the reading of this book than I have while reading any other text – which, given its wordcount relative to the likes of War and Peace , Don Quixote , Middlemarch , etc., speaks for itself. That so much can potentially be plumbed from so few words reflects, I think, both the philosophical depths of the content and its relevance to the experiences of those within our time. In fact, it is so densely packed with suggestion that questions and ideas kept irrepressibly springing forth. However, that may also have a lot to do with my own philosophical ponderings at the time of reading. This blog post will only pertain to a few, choice threads which specifically resonated with me; but, be assured, there is so much more that ...
Read more

Spies by Michael Frayn

*contains spoilers* Stephen Wheatley, the narrator of Frayn’s bildungsroman, Spies, embarks on a journey of reminiscence and lamentation of his early years following a nostalgic whiff of “liguster”, later identified as “privet”, on his daughter’s driveway one evening. Now a man of eighty-something, Stephen leaves his homeland of Germany for the Close of his childhood town in England, as he yearns to search for the answers to the questions painfully reawakened by his olfactory senses. Frayn uses Stephen as an unreliable narrator, fluctuating sporadically between Stephen’s past and present self as he reminisces on the events that shaped his transition from naïve innocence to realised maturity. This method of Frayn’s not only effectively accentuates the differences between the two Stephens, it also creates gaps in the plot providing the reader with further unanswered questions, creating a sense of tension and growing interest as Stephen’s memories are broken, realised, questioned, reconsi...
Read more