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“A sense of sweep,” replied Marlon James, when asked what moves him most in literature. “Sweep isn’t just about external journeys, but internal as well. It can be over years and decades, or across land and sea.” If that explanation is still hazy, pick up his mighty new novel, which is longlisted for this year’s Booker prize and is tirelessly – sometimes exhaustingly – grand and peripatetic. Mounting a grisly exposé of Jamaican homophobia, this polyphonic 640-page doorstopper is an emotionally bruising narrative that roves “uptown, downtown, ghetto and gully” through Aids-era Kingston with sidetrack excursions to 1950s England and a closing leap to 2000s United States.
The novel’s defining event is a gruesome mob attack on eight queer men who have clandestinely come together to work on bringing John Herbert’s 1967 gay prison play, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, to the stage. The goal, in the words of director Havelock Titus, is to shatter “the whole fragile myth of Jamaican male sexuality”. “Because prison,” he explains, “is the ultimate male institution and yet masculine sexualities that could never happen outside in the normal world flourish in there all the time.”
The spunk and sass of these men, their banter and squabbles as they feel each other out and ease into their roles, as well as their fears, insecurities and motivations for doing the play, are relayed by one of the actors: Eddy Porteous, a “white-ish” Belgian Jamaican college student from a well-heeled family. His diary entries over the course of the month preceding the assault make up the novel’s expositional first quarter, illuminating the interplay of class, race and colourism in the experience of Jamaican queerness.
The narrative kicks into gear with the section on the attack. Now we are thrust, chillingly, into the minds of the perpetrators, among whom are a policeman, a self-loathing closet case, a deacon and a reggae singer named Streggeh Don whose hit, Batty Is Not Pussy, is the rallying-cry-cum-soundtrack for the splatterfest. Violence is James’s shtick and a hallmark of his fiction, from torture and sexual abjection in his subversive slavery epic, The Book of Night Women, and gang warfare in his Booker-winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, to the near-ceaseless carnage in his ongoing Dark Star fantasy trilogy. But here, far from the glib relish of which James has been accused throughout his writing career, one senses an unequivocal ethical purposefulness. “I think evil is a choice,” one survivor asserts, “and an ongoing one. Even in the midst of committing wickedness there are choices of how wicked one will be, which is made by the minute.” In order to grasp this statement in all its wounded, furious profundity – to see the outsize hate unleashed on these men as deeply volitional – the reader must bear witness not only from within the action, but also from within the consciousness of the perpetrators.
One man has a branch shoved into his anus and dies. Another has both his eyes gouged out. All but Eddy, who had skipped rehearsal on that fateful night, are battered, gashed and maimed. Two of them will later vanish without a trace. Wrestling with survivor’s guilt, Eddy teams up with fellow actor Jordan to try to find them. More so than Eddy, it is Jordan who is the novel’s beating heart. A gleeful, foul-mouthed “sometime prostitute”, animated by the dangerous, liberatory ethos of American author John Rechy’s 1977 book The Sexual Outlaw, which he obsessively reads for affirmation, he is the Jamaican homophobe’s “battymonster” come to life.
Jordan and Eddy’s journeys into the promiscuous gay underground and the dark heart of heterosexual Jamaica are recounted in a series of interview transcripts, as the pair take turns speaking to a journalist from an American media outlet. Their frustrations gather further poignancy within the broader tragedy of the Aids epidemic engulfing Jamaica’s gay community: “This is what Aids is after all, isn’t it? One long set of disappearing acts. First is watching the friends and family disappear. Second act is when people try to disappear you. Third act is watching your body vanish from itself and wondering where the fuck you going, piece by piece, until all of you gone … If there is a fourth act it’s when everybody erase your name as if you were never born in the first place. Certainly no Christian church ever christened you.”
The Disappearers is a bleak and uncompromising exploration of rage and survival; of trauma and its afterlife; of the terrible intimacy that binds victims to their perpetrators, and survivors to the dead, as well as revenge’s lure for those who are not given their due. Throughout, the narrative obsesses over the questions of whether meaning can emerge from the devastation of atrocity, and whether the void left by the missing is a mystery to be solved, or a limbo to be helplessly inhabited. What if the disappeared, done with being part of a world bent on eliminating them, didn’t want to be found? Fizzing with filth, snark and venom, the novel hawks and spits at convention, especially the politics of respectability that insists on restraint; it strafes down on homophobia with ruthless abandon. Few books have mapped the beleaguered realities of queer existence with such psychological depth, harrowing realism and searing condemnation.
The formal design, however, is not without flaws. The overlong narrative sags in places, tarrying where it should speed along, and the intertextuality – most obviously the revenge plot’s debt to Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon – can veer into self-conscious pastiche. While the book’s conversation with the queer canon is richly rewarding (besides Herbert and Rechy, Gide, Genet, Vidal, Wilde, Baldwin and Holleran are some of the visiting spectres), I struggled with the fact that a significant chunk of the action is reported rather than dramatised. As well as the interview transcripts, we have letters from Havelock to a friend; some pivotal moments are thus experienced either at a temporal and affective remove, or inevitably somewhat summarised.
Ultimately, these are redeemable shortcomings in an otherwise remarkable novel. James makes room for the contradictions of queer life, its intimacies, estrangements and hungers, in utterly indelible ways. His prose is a consistent triumph: bitter and hilarious, lyrical, bawdy, pugnacious and scorchingly, ravishingly queer. The Booker judges have described this novel as a “reckoning”; it is incontestably also a haunting.
The Disappearers by Marlon James is published by Hamish Hamilton (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
