If you’re looking for safe, tame and familiar fiction where the writer leads you gently by the hand and promises to look after you, then A Brief History of Seven Killings is not for you. If you’re looking for something wild and rebellious that breaks free from the chains of convention and politesse, look no further. But read this novel at your peril – buckle up, maybe take a painkiller or two. You have been warned. 

Almost as soon as the novel begins, Marlon James delivers a series of shocks to the system, plunging the reader into the dangerous underbelly of life in 1970s Jamaica. It is 1976, and the island is preparing for a general election. In a political contest that would become notorious, two competing parties, the Jamaica Labour Party and the People’s National Party, spawned rival gangs, and the violence escalated into a climate of armed warfare that soon span out of control. 

James shows us that the slums of Kingston are steeped in poverty and hardship, and the epidemic of violence is leaking out into the more genteel suburbs. Murder, rape and torture are used as weapons of personal and mass control, whether it’s domestic, gangland or state enforced. Forget about the ‘seven killings’ of the title – the body count is way higher than that – while corruption prevails among the police, the theoretical upholders of law and order. In this macho culture, women are soft targets and the novel is constantly negotiating stratifications based on class, colour, race, gender, sexuality and nationality that reveal complex patterns of disadvantage and persecution. 

A corrupt society in chaos is perfect for the drug trade, which brings with it madness and mayhem. As the novel progresses, we see that the cocaine pipeline kicks off in Colombia with the cartels, who go into business with a Jamaican syndicate based in New York. Meanwhile, the CIA, deep into the Cold War, is involved in covert operations to influence Jamaican politics and further America’s interests in the region. A character called The Singer, based on Bob Marley, features as a focal point in the first half of the book. The novel is fiction, but it is fiction based on facts. 

Early on, a fourteen-year-old boy witnesses his mother perversely beaten and brutalised by his father with a broom handle. The next day his father is orally raped by a gangster, before both of the boy’s parents are shot dead in their home while he hides in the room. Managing to escape detection by the murderers, he runs away, comes under the auspices of a vicious gang lord, and his fate is sealed. Although inevitably he becomes a brutal gangster, capable of the worst atrocities, we can never forget what he saw and endured when he was orphaned. 

Such is James’ mastery with character psychology, and his understanding of the nuances of causality, we are always reminded that characters are suffering, regardless of their own morally reprehensible behaviour. In this novel, there are the victims and there are the perpetrators, but they are often interchangeable. Unresolved trauma hangs heavy in the characters’ lives, and indeed in the nation’s life. We mustn’t forget that Jamaica had only quite recently, in 1962, been liberated from its status as a British colony, after hundreds of years of violence, brutalisation and exploitation. This began with the genocide of the Tainos, Jamaica’s indigenous people in the 1600s, followed by the enslavement of Africans for hundreds of years. The soil of the island has been steeped in blood since the Europeans first arrived. The bloodshed in the novel is but a continuum.

Toxic masculinity has long been a catch-all cliché to describe negative male behaviours, but nonetheless it is an unavoidable theme in a novel dominated by men. That said, one of the most fascinating characters is Nina Burgess, a Jamaican woman who undergoes a formidable emotional and narrative journey in the novel. James interrogates what it takes to be a man in a culture where they are not allowed to express any emotion other than anger and where they are forced to mask their vulnerabilities in order to appear strong, because if they do not they will be seen as weak and treated as prey. Homosexuality plays out on several levels, although as it is both illegal and a cultural taboo, it’s typically disguised, repressed, bandied about as an insult between men, and rationalised as something other than what it is. 

Marlon James shows us how the deeply damaged can lash out and damage others; how those who are poor and lacking in opportunities to earn a living have no choice but to resort to crime; how those who are coerced have no choice but to follow orders to maim and murder; how ambition can be ruthless and how some people will stop at nothing to succeed. We see how they calculate, organise, and manipulate through an MO of subterfuge, skullduggery, sabotage and illegality. 

The novel employs a light Jamaican patois written as phonetic English that can be easily understood by non-Jamaican speakers, but maintains the delicious linguistic flavours and textures of patois. James’ prodigious and versatile ventriloquist skills have created a powerful polyphony with a large set of unique characters. Their dynamic, hearable and often self-serving voices are so convincing they insinuate themselves into our psyche, breathing hotly into our ears, persuading us of their points of view when we have already heard different versions of the same situation. While the chapters are all divided into sections featuring first-person narrators, who would typically offer only a limited perspective, the effect of so many aggregated voices, rarely in agreement, provides a more rounded and omniscient understanding of situations, events and characters. It is a discordant chorus singing a song of many parts about a society in turmoil.

Few writers can pull off the oratorial exuberance of this commodious novel without flagging. James’ language is often electrifying, mesmerising, rhapsodic, lyrical. It’s no surprise that for many years he attended a Jamaican Pentecostal church, almost daily. He has talked about the extreme evangelical exorcism of his churchgoing experience, which was to ‘drive out the gay’, as he has described it. In these churches, there is a collective engagement with language that is emotionally expressive, both individualistic and choral, and the preachers use vivid metaphors and an impassioned delivery to communicate. A Brief History of Seven Killings carries this linguistic influence, although the novel does not offer us spiritual communion. Instead, it resurrects, dissects and, through the transformative power of fiction, perhaps begins the process of exorcising this particular period in Jamaican history. In such a novel, bursting with raucous profanities, graphic acts of violence and depravity, as well as a predilection for the scatological, I doubt very much it will make it onto the reading lists of Pentecostal book groups any time soon. 

While this is a highly literary novel, it’s also a page-turning thriller and very ‘gangster’ – succeeding at both, equally. Experimental but readable, physically visceral and intellectual. It’s all of it – not one or the other. 

In case I’ve given the wrong impression, humour is never far from the surface. In my opinion some countries are simply funnier than others, and Jamaicans rank high on the GSOH scale, which is reflected in this badass, bodacious fiction with its aesthetic bravado and wicked mischievousness. I can imagine the author chuckling as he wrote some of it, just as I imagine the rage he surely felt at the systemic injustices he describes. While huge swathes of the book must have involved extensive research, this is worn so naturally that it never feels informational or overly expositional, but is embedded into the narrative and relayed through the characters. There is a lot of knowledge here, especially around Jamaican politics, CIA espionage, emigration to the US, the drug trade and the criminal underworld. 

Marlon James is one of the most energetically imaginative novelists around. He’s proven this in all of his books, in John Crow’s Devil and The Book of Night Women that preceded A Brief History of Seven Killings, and with his subsequent African fantasy Dark Star Trilogy – the first two novels already published, Black Leopard, Red Wolf and Moon Witch, Spider King. 

 I remember feeling overjoyed when he won the 2015 Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings. Not only was he the first Jamaican writer to pick up this prestigious award, he was also only the second black winner since the foundation of the prize in 1969. And he won it with a novel written by a Jamaican who knows his country inside out.