Not so brief, as it turns out—this book runs to nearly 700 pages. It deals with gangs and politics in Jamaica, and centers around an actual incident: an assassination attempt on Bob Marley at his house in Kingston in 1976. The seven killings of the title are (I think) of the seven assassins. Certainly there are a lot more than seven killings in the book, so that’s another problem I had with the title.
Up until about page 500 I was finding this book more trouble than it was worth. The story is passed among the voices of a large set of characters, a la The Sound and the Fury. Many of these characters speak in a thick Jamaican patois. For example:
This is how nine man become eight. Last night Josey Wales tell we what we going do. Renton from Trench Town say him cut a hit tune and he not pulling no gun like that boy in the Heptones who in prison when white man put him song in a movie. He say that him baby mother go to the Singer record studio and they give her money for the baby and her mother and her whole family. And he know that she is just one of more than hundred people that get help from the Singer and what goin’ happen if that stop? Josey Wales say that don’t make him better that make him worse because all him doing is giving poor people fish to eat because now that he reach he don’t want nobody else learn how to catch fish for himself. Some of we receive that reasoning but not Renton from Trench Town. Weeper take out him gun to shoot the bitch right deh so. Josey Wales say no, man, listen to the man and understand him reasoning. Then Josey Wales say that one has to know the factors. We don’t know what he mean, so he say kinetic energy: KE = mv2/2 (where m is mass and v is velocity). Yaw. Deformation. Fragmentation. Bleeding. Hypovolemic shock. Exsanguination. Hypoxia. Pneumothorax, heart failure and brain damage. Bang. Him skull stopped the bullet but blood still splash on Weeper chest. Not me Starsky and Hutch t-shirt! Weeper say as the man body fall and he wipe brains off him chest. Josey Wales put the gun back in him holster.
Did somebody get shot or not? Possibly not in that paragraph, but probably in the next.
James deploys the full modernist bag of tricks: Long stretches of dialog without quotation marks where it’s often difficult to keep track of who’s speaking to whom. Chapters that provide one side of a dialog leaving the reader to puzzle out who is being spoken too and what the other half of the conversation must be, etc.
And so many characters, major and minor! Many of them are gang members, and it’s not easy to distinguish one from another. Some are killed off before we get a handle on them; others live long enough that we begin to be able to know them.
The result of all this is that it’s difficult to know from one moment to the next what’s going on. Some novels deliberately blindfold you and then spin you around for a few chapters at the beginning and then coalesce by page 100 or so. With A Brief History of Seven Killings it takes a lot longer than that. For the last 200 pages the action moves to New York City, and for me this was when the clouds finally began to part. More careful readers might have gotten their bearings earlier. I just forged ahead, watching as characters came and went and occasionally got raped or murdered, and figuring things out as best I could.
Part of me wonders if James couldn’t have made his book a little more accessible—did he write like Faulkner because he wanted to be seen as Faulkner’s equal? Then again, given that I am such a fan of Faulkner, why should I begrudge this writer the privilege of challenging readers to the same degree?
James does give us one character we can root for: Nina Burgess is a woman who has had a one-night stand with Marley and has taken to standing outside his house waiting for a chance to speak with him. I cannot remember exactly why she is determined to do this—I thought maybe she was pregnant with his child but that doesn’t seem to be the case. She is described in the Cast of Characters at the beginning of the book as a “former receptionist, currently unemployed.” So she is a bit unraveled even when we first meet her, but her problems quickly escalate. She is outside Marley’s house the night of the assassination attempt and comes face to face with the head assassin, who puts a gun to her but doesn’t pull the trigger. Thereafter she shows up in different places using different names. James doesn’t actually tell us it’s the same woman whenever she re-emerges, but he doesn’t make it hard for us to figure it out. He also doesn’t tell us, until the very end, why she is on the run, but we figure that out too. I’m not a big mystery reader so I’m not used to having to figure so many things out as I read a book. But even though this isn’t a typical mystery, you’d better have your deerskin cap on if you plan on reading it. If you didn’t know, for example, that Bob Marley died of metastatic melanoma that started in his big toe you’d be mystified by several long passages.
Nina Burgess is a plucky, resourceful character who eventually becomes a nurse in New York. After 30 or 40 or so pages of violence and mayhem it was always a relief to come upon one of her chapters for a respite—I actually started looking ahead to see where the next one was. Her goal is to get as far away from Kingston and the man who might want to kill her as she possibly can. Along the way she has an affair with an American executive where she tries to pass herself off as a sex kitten so that he might agree to take her back to Arkansas with him, and then later gets a job in New York as caretaker for a rich man with a rather peculiar mental disorder.
The gangster story is, in the end, very impressive, more like Scarface than The Godfather. The CIA and the Columbian drug cartel play their part. In the early sections of the book there are several Kingston dons completing for power, but the one who survives and prospers goes by the name of Josey Wales. Which is odd because this character’s history goes back to 1966, but the Clint Eastwood movie that he presumably derives his name from came out in 1976, by which point the character in this book is well established. Wales is smart and he is as vicious as they come—the baddest of the bad. He eventually comes to control a large part of the North American drug market. But can he outrun his fate as one of the Marley assassins, or is he merely the last of the seven to meet his fate?
Marley, but the way, is mentioned maybe twice in the book by name—he is otherwise only referred to as The Singer.
The afterword to the book is revealing. James says:
The problem was that I couldn’t tell whose story it was. Draft after draft, page after page, character after character, and still no through line, no narrative spine, nothing. Until one Sunday, at W.A. Frost in St. Paul, when I was having dinner with Rachel Perlmeter, she said what if it’s not one person’s story? Also, when did I read Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying? Well, maybe not in those exact words, but we also talked about Marguerite Duras, so I went and read The North China Lover as well. I had a novel, and it was right in front of me all that time. Half-formed and fully formed characters, scenes out of place, hundreds of pages that needed sequence and purpose. A novel that would be driven only by voice.
I’m thinking maybe Rachel should have kept her mouth shut. It’s a great pile of a book and it’s got some great stuff in it. But from a certain perspective it still reads like a work in progress.
