[A Brief History of Seven Killings is] epic in every sense of that word: sweeping, mythic, over-the-top, colossal and dizzyingly complex. It’s also raw, dense, violent, scalding, darkly comic, exhilarating and exhausting — a testament to Mr. James’s vaulting ambition and prodigious talent … [Bob] Marley...becomes an almost peripheral figure in this novel, as the story focuses in on fictional versions of ‘the people around him, the ones who come and go’ … Mr. James’s characters, old and young, male and female, Jamaican and American, exhale their thoughts in language that is casually profane, and as kinetic and syncopated as music. Many of this novel’s chapters are written in a kind of patois stream of consciousness, which, however confusing at first, works to immerse the reader in the world in which Marley grew up, the world that gave birth to reggae.
Marlon James’s epic and dizzying third novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, is anything but brief and describes far more than seven killings … Based on actual events, [it] delineates strategies of war in a world of men—gang lords, hit men, politicians, and CIA agents, to name just a few … James is not the first to suggest that Marley, who had attained prophet status and seemed to support Manley’s increasingly socialist vision, became a target of CIA-backed JLP leaders...but to the best of my knowledge, Marlon James is the first to go at this historical moment through fiction. This allows him to get inside the heads of brutal people, to fill in the gaps left by historical research, and to find the humanity (and even humor) in the grimmest of situations … If the purpose of reportage is to tell us what happened, and the purpose of fiction is to show us how it felt, then James has succeeded on both counts.
If A Brief History of Seven Killings can be said to have a main idea, it’s that nobody escapes, at least not entirely, from violence. Because violence isn’t an event, but a kind of potential—a force, like gravity, that lurks in every curve of space … It has less in common with most recent literary fiction than it does with Breaking Bad and The Wire...Seven Killings is surprising, suspenseful, and, when it stirs from its sinister languor, fast, with action sequences as finger-curling and eyelid-lifting as anything onscreen. But as much as it resembles the best of today’s television, the novel conveys violence with an interior nuance perhaps only achievable in prose. Its intensity comes less from the story’s underworld glamour than it does from James’s style and syntax—a language that gives texture to danger and its psychic terrain … Some will be frustrated by its lack of ‘larger comment,’ the usual hall pass for dangerous art. Others will find it too painful. People who think good writing should always be graceful won’t like it at all.
James...is a virtuoso at depicting violence, particularly at the beginning of this book, where we witness scene after scene of astonishing sadism, as young men and boys are impelled by savagery toward savagery of their own. This, again, is how history feels to those on the wrong side of it, and the novel’s great strength is the way it conveys the degradation of Kingston’s slums … This novel fundamentally is an epic of postcolonial fallout, in Jamaica and elsewhere, and America’s participation in that history. In the end, the book is not only persuasive but tragic, though in its polyphony and scope it’s more than that … Spoof, nightmare, blood bath, poem, A Brief History of Seven Killings eventually takes on a mesmerizing power.
Exploding with violence and seething with arousal, the third novel by Marlon James cuts a swath across recent Jamaican history. It leaves its Kingston ghettos strewn with victims, a few of them lovers, all of them spattered with blood … Whether ghost politicos or CIA spooks, all concur on Marley’s real-life good fortune: The Singer survived — a miracle and, in a book rife with secret murders, a stinging irony … The epic sweep of Seven Killings never feels cartoonish. James takes us deep into his criminal power dynamics, in monologues laced with breathtaking obscenities … What most distinguishes A Brief History of Seven Killings isn’t the outrages, but rather the odyssey.
Marlon James' demanding, brilliantly executed third novel is based with extreme artistic license on the 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley...In this novel — and surely in life — the planned assassination of ‘the Singer’ (the Bob Marley of this book) is only one element in the CIA's effort to unseat the government of Prime Minister Michael Manley … Put plainly, A Brief History of Seven Killings calls for a stout heart, strong stomach and prodigious powers of concentration, but the reader so equipped will be rewarded with an experience he or she will not soon forget. The novel makes no compromises, but is cruelly and consummately a work of art.
The novel consists of first-person vignettes from more than 20 characters. These include a dead politician, a CIA station chief and rival gang leaders. Marley fades into the background, a foil for the others’ actions … The book is dominated by male voices. In the background, women nag their husbands or are assaulted to provide gritty details …The expletive-laced language and combination of sex and violence stops being shocking…If the novel is meant to show the devastating effects of CIA destabilization campaigns on communities from Kingston to Brooklyn, it needed stronger editing to keep the reader from becoming inured to the violence.
Marlon James’ epic novel about what he refers to as ‘post-post-colonial’ Jamaica is so thick with characters and voices that it induces feelings of disorientation similar to traveling to a foreign country for the first time … Switching narrators at a furious pace, Marlon uses this incendiary backdrop to explore the lives of the colorful street criminals and gang lords who had a hand in the assassination attempt on Marley … James’ use of island dialect only adds to the difficulty of following the story. His approach is both thrilling and infuriating. But this is history as it actually unfolds — messy, multifaceted and full of loose ends.
Marlon James’ third novel is a technically astounding epic...a wildly ambitious and brilliant book of ambiguity and ambivalence. It’s also one of despair and cutting cultural commentary … Mr. James, a Jamaican who knows his country all too well, commands texture, his key achievement hallucinatory evocations of neighborhoods, airports, a crack house. One target of his anger is tone-deaf journalism that doesn’t get it right; this is a form of revisionist history … Mr. James messes with language like a jazz musician. He changes rhythm and cadence by speaker – reporter Pierce and former politician Sir Arthur Jennings tell their stories in linear fashion and full sentences – and plays with punctuation, even typography … Mr. James raises fiction’s ante throughout this bravura novel, raising cultural issues along the way that still disturb.
Be prepared: it is a busy book. Characters include the would-be assassins, various gang bosses, journalists and CIA officers. There's the ghost of a politician, and an even more ghostly Bob Marley himself … A Brief History is, with dozens of characters and motives, impressively dizzying. Ultimately, it's also a beautiful mess … Sometimes figuring out what the heck a character is talking about feels like a contest of will — but when you work out why they feel and think a certain way, you realize: that's literature working. And that's a moment rare enough in any book, let alone one so fun.
Chapters jump back and forth among characters — politicians, gang members, CIA agents, assassins, drug dealers, addicts, ex-girlfriends and ghosts — several speaking in Jamaican patois...Together, these voices provide a Rashomon-style look at major events in Jamaica's fraught history, including the attempted assassination of Marley and the lingering effects of racism, sexism and violence. But often they're less of a chorus and more a confusing cacophony … While some of the narrative could arguably be condensed to avoid revisiting the same events — illuminating when it reveals new things; exhausting when it doesn't — ultimately, the epic Brief History is an impressive feat of storytelling: raw, uncompromising, panoramic yet meticulously detailed. The Jamaica portrayed here is one many people have heard songs about but have never seen rendered in such arresting specificity — and if they have, only briefly.
