A Brief History of Seven Killings eBook Kindle

This was probably the most challenging novel I've read in several years. Who am I kidding? There's no probably about it. Marlon James has constructed an incredibly complex story, and it took every bit of memory available to me to keep up. He was kind enough to include a cast of characters, but I made it a point to refer to it as little as possible, opting instead to try and follow the story under my own power.

Add to the story's complexity the fact that most of the characters are from the ghettos of Kingston, and speak in a patois that takes some serious acclimation initially, and will slow your reading speed to a crawl at times. Amazingly though, after spending nearly a week with these characters, I felt like I had picked up the meanings quite well and could read those sections much quicker. Strangely, for me, this adaptation was the most rewarding aspect of this particular reading experience. In fact, as much respect as I now have for Marlon James' talent, I have to admit that I did not actually enjoy this novel, and found it made for an almost constantly uncomfortable reading experience.

The last time I felt the inability to enjoy such a well written book, I was reading In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, a Pulitzer finalist. Both books require the reader to spend most of their time in very difficult places. By difficult I mean places where innocents suffer a great deal of agony and injustice, and both books left me feeling a certain hopelessness from which I felt the reader was never released. That may well be James' intention, and the fact that he could take me to such places and make them feel so real as to make me uncomfortable is a testament to his talents.

This novel contains a great deal of incredibly graphic violence (including rape), and in fact I cannot name a more graphically violent novel that I've read in the past few years. Perhaps Philip Meyers' "The Son" comes close? There is also a lot of quite graphic sex, and since the majority of the novel's many characters are hardcore criminals, the language is very often coarse throughout the story. The number of such moments are what makes it difficult for me to recommend the book to anyone whose taste and tolerance for such things I do not know well. But the novel seems to me to have been an honest one, and as you wallow in the depths and the dregs with these gangsters, you sense the suffering from which they were born, and and begin to understand their Machiavellian existence. Again, James was able to take me to some places I've certainly never been, but I can't necessarily say I'm glad I went there.

Overall, this is a brilliantly executed novel by a man who possesses a great deal of talent, and yet it is a book that is likely to prove a challenging read to most, for the reasons I've listed and more. I can't say that I'm happy to have read it, but I can certainly appreciate the art that James has created, and I do take some personal satisfaction in having followed such an intricate story to its end. Reading difficult fiction isn't always enjoyable, but it is usually beneficial, and for that I can say I'm grateful to have read A Brief History of Seven Killings.

"A Brief History of Seven Killings" is an epic, intense, and awe-inspiring book. The comparisons to James Joyce and "As I Lay Dying" are apt and deserved.

A caution: This novel has multiple narrators (one of whom changes names several times), lengthy stream-of-consciousness passages, and is written with a great reliance on Jamaican patois and with references to events that may be unfamiliar to many readers. In short, it is a tough read. I started it and got about 50 pages in and realized I had no idea what I had read, so I put it aside, read some lengthy reviews and pieces of literary criticism about the book, and then started over. That was time well-spent, since after that I quickly became immersed in the book and enjoyed it thoroughly.

The first half of the book, leading up to the attempted assassination of Bob Marley (referred to only as "The Singer", which gets to be a bit cloying), is stronger than the second half, dealing with the deaths of those involved in the attempt. This is not because those latter stories are uninteresting -- they are -- but because James is at his best in fully painting the world of December 1976 Jamaica. The first 300-odd pages take place over just two days, giving all the characters time to emerge. The rest of the book is a bit more rushed (and therefore a bit more confusing).

"A Brief History of Seven Killings", oh where do I start? This is a book full of unbridled ambition and certainly not for the faint of heart (and by that I don't mean specifically because of the violence) given the complex cast of characters, use of patois for the dialogue of the Jamaican characters and the sprawling Jamaican history that James relies on to propel the narrative. It has certainly met with near unanimous critical praise and awarded the prestigious Man Booker Prize last month. Anyone going against such platitudes is likely to face withering criticism for lacking the gravitas and intelligence to appreciate such an erudite novel.

So where do I begin. This book challenged me immensely, more than any book that I can remember since reading Richard Power's "Operation Wandering Soul" about 10 years ago --- my first and only Richard Power's novel. This was the 42nd book I read this year and by far took me more time to get through than the 41 that preceded it. This was for several reasons. (1) I lacked a deep understanding of post-colonial Jamaican history, (so spent time digging up information while reading) (2) I have no familiarity with patois so it often a slog to get through the dialogue of the Jamaican character and truly make sense and understand what was being discussed (I'm not suggesting James should have changed this, it just made it harder for someone unfamiliar). (3) There is an extremely long cast of characters. Even though James provides "a cast of characters" at the beginning, keeping track of them and understanding their intertwined nature is a challenge (4) The book is long and sprawling at nearly 700 pages so won't be a quick read anyway. I don't mind long books per se, my favorite novel of the year is "A Little Life", but the combination of all of the above was asking a lot of readers. At times, I almost gave up but kept with it because there was plenty that I enjoyed.

Was sticking with it worth it? James is surely a supremely talented novelist. I do believe that the last 200 hundred or so pages moves far quicker than the beginning 500 pages --- maybe I was sufficiently acclimated to all the points I made in the last paragraph. I did feel both a sense of accomplishment, relief and admiration (for James, not me) by the time I read the final page. Some were put off by the violence, but it did not bother me since it was a realistic reflection of the characters and people James was chronicling rather than being gratuitous. The reason that I'm only giving a 3 star review is that while I don't mind putting the time and energy into a novel, it felt more like work than enjoyment every time I turned my Kindle on to start reading. I often thought about what I wasn't reading instead of "A Brief History" something that never happens when reading other great novels. For instance, I couldn't put down "A Little Life" or "The Turner House" and felt a sense of loss when I finished them that the characters and story would fade from memory as time elapsed.