![]() ![]() A Brief History, however, is sometimes more impressive than it is easily enjoyable – a difficult book with a stop-start structure that doesn’t quite sweep you up in the way the single narrative voices of the previous novels did.īakhtin saw the novel as the genre of polyphony, incorporating and orchestrating several competing voices. In John Crow’s Devil and The Book of Night Women, the ambition and the accomplishment were perfectly matched. If one were to be curmudgeonly, one might say that A Brief History is slightly more impressive for its ambition than its accomplishment. It is a story worth telling, and a story about Jamaica that doesn’t only take place in Jamaica. But perhaps more importantly, it tells the story of Jamaica in the 1970s and early 80s, when the guns flooded in, CIA agents took up residence, and the island went through one of its most violently defining moments. James’s new novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, tells the story of the attempted assassination of Bob Marley, who is referred to throughout as “the singer”, and its aftermath. In every way, it is a bigger novel than John Crow’s Devil epic in scale, and written with far more narrative power and lyricism. While it embraces a Jamaican dialect, it also established James as an international star. ![]() ![]() Easily one of the best Jamaican novels ever written, The Book of Night Women, a slave narrative, is an incredible feat of plotting, pace and language. ![]()
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