Marlon James is a Jamaican writer living in Minnesota. He's written several novels and teaches at Macalester College in St. Paul. A Brief History of Seven Killings seems to be the most recognized of his books, and it earned him a Man Booker Prize a year after its publication.
The first half of this book centers around a plot to kill Bob Marley (referred to as "The Singer") on the eve of his peace concert in Jamaica. As any Wikipedia search will tell you, this plot ultimately fails, and Marley lives on to see the 80s, during which time he dies of cancer. From the failed murder plot the author moves on to New York in the 80s and 90s, detailing the doings of several Jamaican gangsters, drug smugglers and exiles in the city that never sleeps.
I want to say that this book didn't deserve the Man Booker Prize, but that's not the case. I've read other Man Booker Prize winners, and compared to those other, inferior books A Brief History of Seven Killings isn't bad. I can't say that it's consistently entertaining, but there are certain parts of it that I genuinely enjoyed.
This said, I had four big problems with this book. They were:
1. It was really too long. The author could have told the same story in far fewer pages.
2. Some of the characters near the beginning are too similar. It's hard to tell them apart, and giving some of them their own chapters was just confusing.
3. This book doesn't always feel like a cohesive whole. The chapters focusing on female characters were excellent - in particular the story of a Jamaican woman trying to marry her way out of Jamaica - but these chapters often feel like short stories stitched together between the doings of gangsters, rather than parts of a seamless narrative in which every chapter is necessary.
4. The dialogue doesn't always ring true. Take the Tristan character, for example. Would a tough guy like that really rattle on in a conversation? Would he talk and talk, describing his thought processes and various exploits, without a pause? I can't imagine someone that hardcore talking that much, regardless of who was present.
As for the power struggle between the various gangs (posses) and the CIA, I enjoyed it, even if it seemed a little too much like something James Ellroy would have written. Josey Wales, one of the main characters, and Weeper, one of his lieutenants, were interesting personalities, but they were spread too thinly over a lengthy book, and the way they jump into and out of the story is perplexing. I'm not saying that because the author is gay that he can't write convincing gangsters, but I did often feel that he was closer to his female characters, and that they were more fully realized versions of living, breathing people.
The ending of this book is solid however. It just takes a while to get there. I'm guessing that the author wrote better books after this one, and it's just that these books haven't gotten as much attention. I probably won't seek out other books by Marlon James, but if I stumble across one I might give it a shot.
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