Marlon James’ new novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, revolves around the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1976.
The novel draws a large and diverse cast of characters: law-enforcement, people on the wrong side of the law, an unhappy soul who has crossed over to the other side, a woman living in the hope of another chance to slip inside the singer’s gate, and many more. Marley, the character at the epicentre of the shifting narrative, is however unnamed and largely absent.
James says that he shied away from trying to understand and represent Marley’s perspective for a number of reasons. In any case, his interest lay more with what happened around Marley than what was happening in the mind of the man himself. Having cast aside Marley’s point of view as one from which to tell the story, James struggled to find a character who could portray the man’s rippling influence.
The article explains how the idea for the right narrative perspective came about:
The novel had a slow start. At first he tried to write it from the American hit man’s point of view, a character who wouldn’t understand the implications of his actions, but James got stuck. Another hundred pages from another character’s perspective didn’t work, either.
Frustrated, he told a playwright friend, “I don’t know whose novel this is; I can’t figure out whose story it is.” She replied, “Why do you think it’s one person’s story?”
That was the key.
[...]
James constructed a novel with a cast of characters so huge it fills four pages at the front of the book.
“I wanted different degrees of distance, everybody from somebody who fired the shot to somebody who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he says. As a child hearing of Marley’s shooting, he understood “if he could get shot, then anybody could be,” while now he sees the incident as “allegory — we’re descending into chaos in the country.”
Book details
- A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
EAN: 9781594486005
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