Dave's Book Blog: "A Brief History of Seven Killings" by Marlon James

Sunday, 31 August 2025

"A Brief History of Seven Killings" by Marlon James

Winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize.

It's not brief. And there are far more than seven killings. In fact the seven killings referred to in the title (which is also the title of the magazine articles written by fictional journalist Alex Pierce) refer to one massacre which takes place in one chapter of the fourth part of this epic.

It is written from multiple viewpoints. The five parts (each introduced by the ghost of the first man to be murdered) are divided into shorter chapters, each being narrated in the first person perspective by a character. There are a lot of characters and many of them have individual voices, although they mostly divide into Jamaican gangster speak, Jamaican posh speak, and US speak.

This use of language is one of the key characteristics of the novel, creating a vivid and direct connection to the reader. The Jamaican gangsters use patois mixed with Rastafarian words and a considerable amount of swearing; there are some limitations to this vocabulary (the almost ubiquitous use of the word "pussyhole" as an epithet for someone you don't like) which slightly undermines the suggestion that some of the gangsters are intelligent autodidacts.

The raw freshness of this novel is created largely from the shock tactics of using this unexpurgated language as well as the repeated cold-blooded killing and the misogyny.

It is a vivid portrayal of the emptiness of the gangster's life. These young men have to kill or be killed; their life expectancy is short; they have to be harder than their fellows in order to progress up the hierarchy and improve their chances of survival. As Demus, a young recruit says, he tried to kill the Singer not because he didn't like the Singer but to impress his fellow gang-members.

There's a lot of murder. One character has qualms (about killing the wrong person, an innocent kid). As the book progresses, the killing becomes more and more extreme, perhaps to show that the violence became worse once it was exported from its roots in the Jamaican ghetto, although that sounds racist. I think a more likely reason is that the author had to make the killing worse and worse (beheadings, burnings alive etc) in order to keep shocking the reader.

Given that the focus of the book is on criminal gangsters of whom only one is female, this misogyny is perhaps not surprising. Almost all of the men see women purely in terms of sex objects (or, occasionally, as brood mares). There are only two female narrators, one who has only a few pages and the other who reappears throughout the book although her name changes. Otherwise, the novel is dominated by the make perspective. In fact one might argue that gay men (there are two major characters, both killers, who are gay) have a larger say in the narrative than women.

In Aspects of the Novel, E M Forster writes “Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.” This is a long book, nearly 700 pages in my paperback version. I actually think it should have been two or three books. The first two sections, dealing with the shooting of Bob Marley (he is only twice mentioned by name, once as 'Marley' {Original Rockers: Alex Pierce #1} and another time as 'Bob' - elsewhere he is always called 'the Singer' in his Jamaica home, would stand alone as a tightly structured novel. The next three sections drag out the aftermath, moving to the USA, following the characters who were involved, either as culprits or witnesses, and explaining how, by getting involved in drug dealing, Jamaican gang warfare led to an explosion in drug abuse in New York. I found these parts increasingly heavy going, I was reading just to get to the end, I did want to know what happened to the characters involved but I wouldn't have minded if their fates had been left a mystery. The fresh use of Jamaican patois had become routine, something to be admired because of the author's ability to long it out. The shock value of the swearing, the misogyny and the killings was blunted. The book was, for me, in the end, too long.

In the long run, and the run was long, I found this novel an impressive achievement but I didn't derive much enjoyment from reading it.

Selected quotes:

“If it no go so it go near so.” (epigraph) = If it didn’t happen just like that, it more or less did.
“Living people wait and see because they fool themselves that they have time. Dead people see and wait.” (Sir Arthur George Jennings)
“If change ever going to come then we will have to wait and see, but all we can do down here in the Eight Lanes is see and wait.” (Original Rockers: Bam-Bam #1)
“People so poor they can't even afford shame.” (Original Rockers: Bam-Bam #1)
“Every time you reach the edge, the edge move ahead of you like a shadow until the whole world is a ghetto.” (Original Rockers: Bam-Bam #1)
“The sun is jumping ship and evening's coming.” (Original Rockers: Barry DiFlorio)
"What does it mean when the conscience of America airbrushes pussy for a living?" (Original Rockers: Barry DiFlorio) Referring to the fact that Penthouse, a soft porn magazine, combined its pictures with investigative reporting, particularly unveiling US government scandals.
“Things hard and getting more and more crucial by the day when a nursery worker have to skin out onstage.” (Original Rockers: Josey Wales)
“Only when we come to Revelation that we take stock of Genesis.” (Ambush in the Night: Papa-Lo #2)
“She gave me that I-expected-just-a-little-more-from-you look that she either inherited or studied from Mummy.” (Ambush in the Night: Nina Burgess #2)
“Soldier don't act like we is crime and them is order, soldier act like we is enemy and this is war.” (Ambush in the Night: Papa-Lo #3)
“I wouldn't befriend him if he was all that could stop me from being buttfucked raw by Satan and his ten big-dicked demons.”
“Guess what, for all its shit, communism is more socially progressive than us.” (Shadow Dancin’: Barry DiFlorio)
“As small as America's dick is, those limeys will stretch across the Atlantic to suck it.” (Shadow Dancin’: Barry DiFlorio)
“The sun running away before we get to the bay. It don't have what it take to witness when man get dark.” (Shadow Dancin’: Papa-Lo)
“I'll bet anybody that my nothing is bigger than their nothing any day of the week.” (White Lines / Kids in America: Dorcas Palmer # 1)
“Is that them call fatalism? I don't know, brethren, that word seem more connected to fatal than it connected to fate.” ((White Lines / Kids in America: Tristan Phillips #5)