Chain-Gang All-Stars is an exuberant circus of a novel, action-packed and expansive, almost too much to process. It plays out in a dystopian US just a shuffle-step from the norm, where predominantly Black prisoners fight not just for the entertainment of a primetime TV audience but, indirectly, for the reader’s benefit too. The narrative explodes in all directions. The tale at the centre is sometimes obscured. The book is unruly and knowingly compromised but it comes fuelled by a sense of thrilling, righteous rage.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah landed an ardent fanbase with his bestselling 2018 debut, Friday Black, a collection of speculative short stories depicting a culture in which bargain-crazed consumers attack the local department store, and white tourists at a theme park pay for the pleasure of shooting the Black staff. Chain-Gang All-Stars also began life as a short story before blowing up out of all proportion, like the proverbial mosquito that accidentally taps an artery, to the point where its high-concept conceit becomes a conduit for the intertwined horrors of privatised prisons, reality TV and the Wagner group’s army of convicts in Ukraine. This is such a rich seam to mine that it feels borderline unmanageable.
Undeterred, Adjei-Brenyah builds a plausible fictional world within our implausible real one. He tells us that Chain-Gang All-Stars Battleground is the top-rated show on the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment channel (CAPE) and that the hammer-wielding Loretta Thurwar is the star of the circuit, with scores of bloody victories already under her belt. He explains how the combatants in each chain gang are called Links and that these Links never fight one another, only gladiators from rival prisons. The most successful fighters become pop idols, sex symbols. If they survive three years on the tour, they win the ultimate prize, a get-out-of-jail card. Naturally most won’t make it that far. The average life expectancy for a Link is three months.
Just as most hit TV shows plunder from material that has scored well in the past, so too does Chain-Gang All-Stars, which lifts freely from The Hunger Games and The Running Man, Rollerball and Battle Royale. Where it differs from more straightforward genre fare is in foregrounding what would normally remain as a political subtext. Adjei-Brenyah wants to highlight the factual springboards beneath his flights of fancy, providing footnotes to explain the intricacies of the 13th amendment, the psychological effects of solitary confinement and the 1944 state murder of 14-year-old George Stinney. Chain-Gang All-Stars, he stresses, isn’t fantasy at all. Instead, it’s a nightmarish burlesque about industrialised racism.
The sheer weight of this supporting evidence – happily accommodated by the book’s maximalist style – frequently spins us off course. Alternating chapters roam far and wide, keeping tabs on a supporting cast of TV executives, “abolitionist” protesters and a sceptical armchair critic who is slowly sucked in and converted. These cutaways give Chain-Gang All-Stars the bracing panoramic sweep of an old-school social novel in the vein of Steinbeck or Dos Passos, but the technique needs finessing. As it is, Adjei-Brenyah combines the winning confidence of a young artist who is unafraid to tackle an enormous canvas with the nervousness of a debutant who worries about leaving his reader with the same group of people for more than a few pages at a time. His plot is constantly interrupting itself to move us along and show us something new.
At the book’s heart sits a love story. This is the tale of Thurwar’s doomed romance with her fellow Link, Hurricane Staxxx, who quotes poetry to camera and weeps after each kill. We know that Links in the same gang don’t fight one another, and Thurwar is only two weeks away from her “freeing day”. Except that inevitably the game is rigged and the two lovers are put on a collision course. This cheat is so brazen that even Micky Wright – the show’s slick compere – is briefly revolted and can barely read out the announcement.
Adjei-Brenyah sets about these proceedings as though he’s an MC himself. He’s a vivid voice in the drama, a firm hand on the decks; here to keep the show rolling, provide contextual information and whet the appetite ahead of the tale’s big action set pieces. His prose, tellingly, is at its most exhilarating during the bloodiest clashes, when it’s torn between disgust and excitement, seemingly intent on implicating the author alongside everyone else.
CAPE, we are told, is in the business of creating “elegant and sustainable entertainment ecosystems”, in which we all play our part whether we choose to or not. The protesters are creative collaborators to be accommodated. Dissent creates buzz, which leads to better ratings. There’s no escape, the book argues. We are all links in the chain. Thurwar and Staxxx are the products. The consumer is us.
• Chain-Gang All-Stars is published by Harvill Secker (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
