The Disappearers

‘The Disappearers is among Marlon James’s most ambitious and history-making works, a novel that examines territory Caribbean literature has rarely dared to occupy. Beginning in late 1980s Kingston, it follows eight male actors rehearsing what is billed as Jamaica’s first openly gay play. When the men become victims of brutal homophobic violence, the novel shifts register: in the years that follow, one survivor sets out to investigate the fates of the others, and what begins as a theatrical story becomes something closer to a reckoning. 

James is a singular literary talent. His dialogue is sharp and propulsive, his phrasing is poetic, visceral and capable of moving from the painful to the darkly hilarious within a single exchange. The Disappearers could be read as a long overdue, clear-eyed confrontation with Jamaican homophobia: unflinching in its honesty, but written with the full complexity and love of someone who knows the place and its contradictions from the inside.’

Kirkus

‘As in his Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), James brings multilayered life to a troubling era in his homeland’s recent history. He engages with his landscapes and the diverse characters populating them with intensity, passion, and bountiful, often graphic detail. With the same affinity for Dickensian storytelling he’s shown in his sword-and-sorcery epics, James tells this searingly realistic tale through interview fragments, journal entries, letters, and, in recreating the horrific attack, with random, frantic voices that leave unsettling echoes.

Even when it stress-tests your senses, this sprawling depiction of gay life in Jamaica is galvanizing.’

Yagnishsing Dawoor, the Guardian

‘The Disappearers is a bleak and uncompromising exploration of rage and survival; of trauma and its afterlife; of the terrible intimacy that binds victims to their perpetrators, and survivors to the dead, as well as revenge’s lure for those who are not given their due. Throughout, the narrative obsesses over the questions of whether meaning can emerge from the devastation of atrocity, and whether the void left by the missing is a mystery to be solved, or a limbo to be helplessly inhabited. What if the disappeared, done with being part of a world bent on eliminating them, didn’t want to be found? Fizzing with filth, snark and venom, the novel hawks and spits at convention, especially the politics of respectability that insists on restraint; it strafes down on homophobia with ruthless abandon. Few books have mapped the beleaguered realities of queer existence with such psychological depth, harrowing realism and searing condemnation.’

Dwight Garner, The New York Times

‘Why not just say it? With this novel about gay experience and murderous homophobia in Jamaica and elsewhere during the 1980s and ’90s, James has written a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and possibly of the century thus far.

‘It deserves to be talked about alongside Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children,” for its tumult of language and its crisscrossing post-colonial themes; Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” (James picks up on a revenge scenario from that novel); and William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” — the greatest American novel, I’d argue — for many reasons but especially for the way James, like Faulkner, hammers his themes like a Vulcan, rolling over them relentlessly from new and sometimes oblique angles, advancing and enlarging his attack each time. This is another way of saying “The Disappearers” was one of the signal reading experiences of my adult life. It sank knives deep into my heart. I’m still in recovery from it.’