What do you write after winning the Booker prize? A fine problem to have, to be sure, yet the question of how to follow success – of whether to stick or twist, creatively speaking – hardly seems simple, at least to judge by the number of writers yet to publish another novel since winning.
Post-Booker paralysis hasn’t been an issue for the Jamaican novelist Marlon James, now more than 1,000 pages deep into an ongoing trilogy. After winning in 2015 with his third book, A Brief History of Seven Killings, about the attempted assassination of Bob Marley, he thought of writing a “quiet, literary” narrative about Jamaicans in New York; instead came 2019’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf, a gore-slathered fantasy epic in a mythical ancient Africa of warring kingdoms, roamed by a ragtag band of superpower-boosted antiheroes, including a 300-year-old witch, Sogolon, hunting down a swarm of child-murdering demons.
A gruelling, invigorating reading experience rife with contradictions, it widened the horizons of swords-and-sorcery narratives while presenting a lurid vision of Africa to rival anything in the imperialist make-believe of H Rider Haggard. It was hard not to wonder if the fluid sexuality of the central characters, combined with the story’s late-arriving anti-patriarchal thrust, somehow served to green light the excesses of its expletive-laden, groin-fixated splatterfest. Hard not to suspect, too, that the relentless chopping-and-fucking emphasis served as counterweight to a literary artist’s anxiety about writing a book whose ambitions lay not only in decolonising the fantasy genre but also in recapturing the heady rush of devouring Star Wars novelisations and X-Men comics in his youth.
