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.
