A tense quest opens Marlon James’ sprawling fantasy series set in a brutal, mythical Africa
Aux Features Book Review
Marlon James announced his intention to write a sprawling fantasy trilogy shortly after his previous novel, 2014’s A Brief History Of Seven Killings, won the prestigious Man Booker Prize. The word on it was always that it would be an “African Game Of Thrones,” and this description has been used in what appears to be a couple hundred headlines. This quote, at different points, has been traced to both James and his publisher, but in subsequent interviews, the author has lightly pushed back on the idea. “Game Of Thrones already has black characters and George R.R. Martin is a pretty woke dude,” he told GQ in 2017. “But I like the allusion in the sense of a world of wonder that’s not afraid of going incredibly dark and bitter.”
In that sense, and many others, James’ new book, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, is a clear-cut success. The first in his Dark Star trilogy introduces readers to a robust and enthralling ancient African world. Black Leopard, Red Wolf has all of the accoutrements and tools necessary for quickly grasping the world as written. A long list of “Those Who Appear In This Account” at the front and a series of maps at section breaks are excellent and usable reference points that both seasoned fantasy readers and converts to the genre, enticed by James’ literary fiction pedigree, will find handy.
The plot of Black Leopard, Red Wolf centers on a team that heads out to search for a missing boy. The group includes the point-of-view character, Tracker, who has a superhuman ability to track people via their scents. Along with him is a shapeshifter known as the Leopard, a massive being named Sadogo who very much dislikes being called a giant, and others. They take up the quest at the behest of Amadu, a slaver who is cagey about his relationship to the missing boy and his reasons for so fervently wanting information about his whereabouts.
James’ ragtag team sets out on the journey despite their differences and reservations. The interpersonal tension within the crew is where Black Leopard, Red Wolf really crackles. Tracker is occasionally prickly and controlling, which rubs his colleagues the wrong way. As they’re advancing along their route, they have the choice of proceeding through the dangerous Darklands or taking a detour that would be safer but take more time. As one of the few who has been through the Darklands before, Tracker is insistent they take the safer option. “Everyone finds what they are looking for in the Darklands. Unless you are what they are looking for,” he warns. This proclamation—half impactful warning, half word salad—is not well received. When Sadogo begins to head into the Darklands, ignoring Tracker’s words and leaving him behind, Tracker asks why. “Maybe he thinking he tired of your fat verse,” Fumeli, the Leopard’s bowman says. “You sound like those men with white hair and shriveled skin, who think they talking wise when they just talking old.” Despite the reader’s sympathies lying with Tracker, whose warnings are rooted in lived experience, it’s satisfying to see his sometimes grandiose schtick get knocked down a peg. Watching James balance and narrativize competing sensibilities is consistently enjoyable and rewarding.
The characters that populate Black Leopard, Red Wolf have origin stories rooted in trauma and violence, and James captures it all masterfully. Just as in A Brief History Of Seven Killings, he writes violence with a matter-of-factness that is as clear as it is distressing. He neither luxuriates in it nor protects readers from it. James also makes enduring these descriptions a part of Tracker’s character. Early on, when Tracker is confronting his uncle about murdering several children, he asks if any of his victims screamed. His uncle replies, “All of them did. When we locked them in the hut and set it on fire. Then there was no screaming.” Tracker hears this and thinks, “He said that to shake me, and it did. I didn’t want to become the kind of man who was never disturbed by such news.” The implicit question written into this is whether it’s possible to thrive in a brutal world while remaining humanely sensitive to the brutality.
The Dark Star trilogy can’t answer that question. At least not yet, anyway. As the plot of Black Leopard, Red Wolf unfolds, more and more information about the Kingdoms of the North and South seeps in. Sogolon, a moon witch on the quest, summarizes the political situation this way: “Each kingdom, spread wider, each king get worse. The South kings get madder and madder because they keep making incest with one another. The North king get a different kind of mad, Evil curse them, because they whole line come out of the worst kind of evil, for what kind of evil kill he own blood?”
A trilogy-opener has the difficult job of being a compelling novel in its own right while preparing for what will follow. Black Leopard, Red Wolf clears both bars with ease.
22 Comments
I loved “A Brief History” and James has an incredible grasp on time/place and character development, not to mention the chops to write crime (true or otherwise) with the best of them. And so to be honest, I’m a little bit disappointed that he’ll be rooted firmly in the fantasy genre for at least another two books. I’ll still read this one, though.
Did you read the profile on him in the New Yorker recently? It got me STOKED for the Dark Star trilogy
No, I’ll find that today. Thanks!
That was a great article.It also addressed this notion that fantasy is some lesser genre. I mean, I thought that distinction and dismissal had already died out, but then you see it popping up here and there.
I unabashedly love the NYer, but its perspective is one that is correctly dying out: this fairly stodgy, middle aged dude who’s VERRRRRY apoplectic about spelling “cooperated” without the accompanying umlaut (like, I RARELY read the fiction within, because 90% of the time the narrative is “middle aged professor can’t get it up for his wife”). So I think addressing the idea that fantasy is a “lesser” genre head-on is necessary given its audience.
I don’t think I fully said what I was thinking. So, if I could add an addendum:The article was very much of the idea that people who think fantasy is a lesser genre — or that anyone who thinks anything other than middle-class realistic fiction is a lesser genre — are shoving themselves into the corner. As a whole, the article seems in line with James’s views on genre.
Totally understood that when you wrote it, was trying to add to it by indicating that the article felt like it had to speak directly to they “typical” NYer reader, if that makes sense.
people who think fantasy is a lesser genre … are shoving themselves into the corner.Nah they’re just playing the odds. Most fantasy is good escapist fun and not much more. A considerable amount of it is barely readable. I was under the impression the biggest sellers in genre fiction were crime and “thrillers”?
That’s in the same vein as “Comic books aren’t just for kids anymore.” It’s used when a fairly respected author decides to write in Fantasy, or really in any other popular genre, to gin up some mild controversy in literary criticism circles.
Agreed.
I read an article on NPR’s page about the Man Group dropping out of funding the Man Booker prize after this year, and the writer said that quite a few in academia were delighted. They hemmed about the latest books having some kind of mass literary appeal and slipshod standards, and about some of the winners even being American. I could see that maybe a prize was needed to keep safe from commercial interests, or to let the lesser known, equally skilled authors from a country other than America have a chance to be seen on the world stage. Then I read about Professor James and his fabulous novel and realized all this talk about unserious, commercial American authors meant a black fantasy writer from Jamaica, one whose academic CV is as long as my arm and whose worldbuilding is clearly on par with Tolkien for complex anthropological understanding, and surpasses him for the depiction of human interaction. And I decided, screw those naysayers. It sounds like he deserved the prize. Going to try one of his books.
Heh, the descriptions of the kingdoms is very ASOIAFy but this defintely sounds good, he last book was great and I’d like to see what he does with a completely fantastical setting.
Ha, that bait and switch on that Sphinx-from-Mystery-Men aphorism was nice, I was worried for a second there. Seven Killings is fantastic so I’m interested, although the North/South divide and decay of rule doesn’t sound too dissimilar from other fantasy.
“Everyone finds what they are looking for in the Darklands. Unless you are what they are looking for.” Is a clear allusion to Conrad.
Pre-ordered this an hour ago after seeing your other story about it and reading the first few sentences of a couple reviews that all said basically the same thing: Read this book. I can’t wait.
Fans of James should check out the recent profile in The New Yorker. Great read; it made me very excited for this book and gave me the nudge I needed to finally borrow “Seven Killings” from the library
I’m about 70 pages in and loving it. It’s nothing like Game of Thrones to me as so far there is little dialog or narration, but as with The Book of Night Women and Brief History it is so descriptive as to be occasionally hallucinatory. The scene after he finds out his real background and sits with it for three days is so short in the sense of being a couple of pages but so powerful. What a tremendous author.
what does it mean that there is “little dialog or narration”? i am a little bit dense right now, i guess, but what else is in a novel?
Intense, visceral description dominates the book. Loads of it. And I find that while it at first challenging, I find it to be really effective in this book. Now as the book proceeded past the point where I wrote this comment, there was more conventional narrative in terms of talking about stuff rather than describing sensation, and there is more dialog as well. But never as much as the vast majority of books. This one really tells so much by just describing what is encountered instead of explaining it or letting characters explain it.
Sounds derivative and rife with cultural appropriation.
Him man who got night skin never steal culture. All night skin man have same culture. Africa one big country. Unless white man say it. No but seriously the “Moon witch” dialogue quoted in this review had me cringing. I assume that because Marlon James is black, he’s allowed to write African-analogue characters that way. Anyone else would be crucified on Twitter.It is different from ‘olde-timey’ dialogue in crappy cliche high fantasy though, isn’t it? That’s fluent but archaic (or what the author thinks is archaic) English. The Moon witch line about “making incest” is just bad English, as in, English spoken by someone who isn’t that good at English.Obviously, we are supposed to imagine that these characters are speaking their own language, and it’s just rendered into English. But that just means whatever language she’s actually speaking, she isn’t that good at it either.Or are we supposed to say that this is actually dialect, a cultural identifier for her people? If so, I’d be more well-disposed if she appeared to be speaking a proper creole like Nigerian Pidgin. Though I guess that would take research.Okay it’s probably super unfair of me to judge based on that one snippet of dialogue, but I sill think it would be very interesting to find out why James wrote her like this.
What “we are supposed to imagine”, concerning how the dialogue
is being relayed to us as readers is subject to interpretation in my opinion.
As I am reading the book, the dialogue being written in this manner mimics
similar stylistic choices in A Brief History: sometimes what is written is
“what was said”, sometimes it is what was heard as spoken, sometimes its
translated in an expected manner, sometimes it’s as close an approximation
of translation while keeping the syntax or spirit of the original. I think it’s
a very different thing to write a book that is ostensibly all transposed in a
language very different from its theoretical origin.I think it is valid to question the author’s choices on this
stuff, but assuming the “point” of the way it’s written based on a snippet is,
as you say, unfair.The cultural appropriation argument is a totally different can
of worms, but I think there are a million more interesting questions
like is all euro style fantasy is cultural appropriation from American
authors, is ancestry is enough? do the particulars of African
diaspora exempt black authors from appropriating culture because of their
roots, does being a ‘genre’ convention (in a broad sense) prevent
this language from feeling offensive in its analogue to archaic English, or
does the privilege of being American negative it? I don’t think any of
these can be well discussed on a message board and I don’t think I, being a
non-African mixed(black/white) guy, need to be the arbiter that
discourse.