“Black Leopard Red Wolf Was Sold As an African Game of Thrones. It’s a Weirder Book Than That. Man Booker Prize Winner Marlon James Goes Genre With His Latest Novel.”, 2019-02-06 (; backlinks; similar):
The oft-repeated elevator pitch on Black Leopard Red Wolf, the buzzy new novel from Man Booker Prize winner Marlon James, is that it’s the African Game of Thrones. (“I said that as a joke”, James protested in an interview this week.) To a certain extent, the comparison holds. Black Leopard Red Wolf is a lush epic fantasy set in an enchanted and mythical Africa, filled with quests and magical beasts and vicious battles to the death. But it’s also a much weirder, twistier book than the Game of Thrones parallels would suggest. Most notably, it is not driven by story. Black Leopard Red Wolf actively resists any attempts on the reader’s part to sink inside the world of the book and lose themselves. It is deliberately opaque, on the level of sentence as well as plot.
On the sentence level, James likes to withhold proper nouns until the last possible moment and then waits to reveal them just a little bit longer than you’d think he should be able to get away with. That means his sentences are generally carried by verbs, and you don’t know who is doing what or why for long stretches at a time: You just get an impression of anonymous limbs tangled together in sex or battle for some reason that is not immediately clear.
On the plot level, the quest for a missing boy that ostensibly powers the action of the book is so confusing, and has so little to do with the main character’s motivations, that the rest of the characters are constantly complaining about it. “This child carries no stakes for you”, one says toward the end of the novel to Tracker, our protagonist, and she’s correct. So is the poor sad giant who has the premise of the quest he is on explained to him multiple times and can only conclude, “Confusing, this is.”
…In other words, we know that the quest will be futile and the child will die. We also know that the protagonist is not particularly interested in the quest. It is nearly impossible for a reader to hook into the narrative. Yet Black Leopard Red Wolf spends hundreds and hundreds of pages tracking its many twists and permutations. The opacity here is clearly a deliberate choice on James’s part. He is not interested in easy reads or straightforward stories. “The African folktale is not your refuge from skepticism”, he told the New Yorker earlier this year. “It is not here to make things easy for you, to give you faith so you don’t have to think.” And James plans to keep things challenging through the rest of the Dark Star trilogy, of which Black Leopard is only the first volume. He’s modeling it on Showtime’s Rashomon-like series The Affair, he says, so that each volume will present the same events to the reader through a different point of view. “The series is three different versions of the same story, and I’m not going to tell people which they should believe”, James says.