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Marlon James’ 2015 Man Booker Prize-winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, is virtually impossible to summarize in any meaningful way. The novel is a sprawling epic said amid a time of political chaos in Jamaica during the 1960s and 70s, featuring fifteen narrators, each with unique dialects and voices. The novel somewhat centers on the failed 1976 attempt on Bob Marley’s life, in which a number of gunmen broke into his house and shot Marley, his wife, and his posse, two days before he was scheduled to perform a peace concert in Jamaica. Marley is a towering figure in the development of reggae and rock and roll culture, and has arguably become the most recognizable cultural symbol of Jamaica, but there is still little information known about the events that led up to his assassination attempt.
In this novel, James fills in the blanks of the assassination attempt, as well as the events preceding and following it, inhabiting the voices of Jamaican slum lords, CIA agents, socialist political operatives, journalists, and inhabitants of various Jamaican ghettos. The novel spans about 30 years, beginning with the political strife in Jamaica during the post-colonial rise of socialism, and tracing the lives of various Jamaicans who fled the country to live in cities like Miami or New York, where they became involved in the flourishing business of drug trafficking, participating in the crack epidemic that disadvantaged communities are still feeling the effects of over 30 years later.
Because of the novel’s fragmented narrative style and the jumps in time and setting, the plot can be somewhat difficult to piece together. For the reader, this structure has the unique effect of de-emphasizing the plot in favor of characterization, allowing total immersion in the world of each narrator. James takes the crucial risk of committing fully to writing in the dialect of each character, a choice that can feel condescending in the hands of a less capable writer, but in this novel, speaks to the immense attention paid to authentic characterization, and gives each narrator a very lived-in voice and perspective.
It is clear that James has much to say about Jamaican identity and history, as this novel provides a bloody and sometimes grotesque account of how political violence played out in Jamaica. But James also gives these characters, whose malfeasance can at first glance feel impossible to comprehend, human traits like wit, desire, shame, and anxiety, that make even the deadliest crime lord worthy of a voice and perspective.
The novel is in many ways about the effect of colonialism on Jamaica as a nation, both on a large-scale and individual level, but its lens is much wider than that. In an interview with NPR, James described this novel as “post-post colonial”, and said of his peers grappling with post-post-colonialism, “For us [as opposed to the post-colonial writers], for example, identity is not necessarily how to define ourselves in the relation of colonial power, colonial oppressor — so now it’s a matter of defining who you are as opposed to who you’re not.”