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Black Leopard Red Wolf is the most recent novel from Jamaican author Marlon James, and the follow up to his Man Booker Prize-winning 2014 novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings. James has stated that this novel is the first in his Dark Star trilogy, which will be a fantasy series centered in this same universe, but each with different narrators. Black Leopard Red Wolf begins with two simple phrases: “The child is dead. There is nothing left to know.” However, the following six hundred pages beg to differ, as there is indeed much more to know. Black Leopard Red Wolf takes place in a mythical African landscape, travels between kingdoms, and is populated by a great number of humans and mythical beasts whose interactions blur the lines between reality and fantasy.
The novel is framed as a one-sided conversation between the protagonist, Tracker, and the authority that imprisoned him, whom he calls the Inquisitor, in which he retells the story of how he killed the King’s sister’s child, which landed him in jail. In his retelling of the crime, Tracker basically gives us the history of his life, beginning with early familial betrayals that caused him to abandon his roots and his name, and become a travelling professional tracker, who searches out cheating husbands for their jilted wives, or locates kidnapped children for their concerned parents. Tracker is the titular Red Wolf; he is endowed with a supernatural ability to sniff out the location of anyone, either dead or alive, which is what initially involves him in the quest to locate the King’s sister’s child, a quest that has massive implications for the future of the kingdom.
The narrative framing is crucial to the novel’s consideration of its protagonist, and it seems that the farther into Tracker’s narrative we get, the less we understand of his motivations. Tracker is not the quintessential unreliable narrator, but he is definitely a questionable one, as it feels in many instances that he is concealing an emotional involvement in various situations. The reader is able to discern Tracker’s desires and wants before he expresses them outright. On one hand, this structure creates space between the reader and the narrator because the reader cannot take Tracker’s narrative at face value, but also creates fruitful narrative layers, in which the reader can project their own wants and desires into the narrative and divine their own unique readings of the text.
Unfortunately, as is true of a number of canonical fantasy texts, this narrative is entirely male-centric, with almost no regard given to its female characters, who come off as quite one dimensional, and increasingly grotesque. Tracker himself harbors a deep hatred for women, most of whom he refers to as “witches”. While other characters in the narrative explicitly address Tracker’s general disdain for women, James does little to wrestle with where the misogynist impulse in his protagonist emerged from, especially when it comes to Tracker’s relationship with hi mother. Worst of all, by refusing to address Tracker’s ignorance head on, it can sometimes feel like James agrees with his character.
I would also be remiss not to mention that this novel is not for the faint of heart, on virtually every page the reader can find brutal killings, violent rapes, and gruesome conditions. While this is not unusual for works of fantasy, the narrator’s apathy toward these phenomena can feel a bit uncomfortable for readers who are not used to such things. While the violence is an important factor in the narrative landscape, and offers insight into the horrors that have molded the characters that populate the novel, it can begin to feel exploitative at times, especially with the graphic rape scenes that have little bearing on the narrative and function like curiosities to marvel at. But overall, James creates a fascinating and densely populated narrative universe, with rich characters grounded in unique mythologies, and it remains to be seen whether the remaining books in the trilogy will in any way reshape some of the more problematic components of this text.