Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars comes to publication freighted with hype because of its stark envisioning of American death row prisoners forced to fight one another to the bloody end, with the bouts televised. The prisoners are mainly Black and they become stars in the entertainment industry on the “outside”, with gimmicky names and basic, almost caveman-like signature weapons. Instead of the Norse god Thor’s hammer Mjölnir, here there’s a hammer called Hass Omaha, a scythe named LoveGuile and a mace labelled Vega. The inmates have the chance to move up the fighters’ league and finally be free – if they kill enough of their fellow prisoners. A giant fighter called Barry Harris – fight name Rave Bear – “looked like he’d been pulled from a woodchipper” by the end of a match. Other characters are called Hurricane Staxxx, Gunny Puddles, Ring Ya Bells – an overripe blend of gamer IDs, B-movie love interests, prison nicknames, wrestling monikers and pure grand guignol.
The novel is a crushingly painful, loaded and on-the-nose commentary on racism, exploitation, inequality and the legacy and loud echoes of slavery in the US. The prison system, big business, the entertainment industry, local policing, tech surveillance and the military have all fused into one hellish mega-complex: the fighters are pushed around by “soldier-police”, their every move recorded and broadcast, both for security and to scintillate their reality TV audience; their magnetised restraints made from the latest tech, their fights sponsored by food and beverage brands and trumpeted as family entertainment. Indeed, as one character reflects: “All other sport was just a metaphor for this.” Yet the result is that millions of viewers worldwide are “consuming poison, no matter how savoury the package”.
Unfortunately, the richness of the conceit makes it tiresome to read. Beginning with not one but two blow-by-blow fight scenes, it’s a sweaty mixture of Squid Game, The Hunger Games, Tron, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, Rollerball, Suicide Squad… or any piece of “content” in which gurning convicts and social outcasts are trapped in a dome, game, sting operation or arena and forced to fight for the edification of others. I don’t think we are even supposed to see it as particularly inventive. Adjei-Brenyah’s very point is that it’s not speculative or futuristic fiction at all; it’s the present-day US, given a cartoonish, nightmarish overlay. All the dystopian gimmicks are deeply – even nostalgically – familiar from pop culture, as are the barely concealed pseudonyms. “BlackOut Night”, like the movie The Purge, is when all surveillance cameras are off so that crimes may be committed with impunity. Events are sponsored by WholeMarket and LifeDepot rather than the real-world Whole Foods Market and the Home Depot.
Even though the ideas are big and bold, the novel is a slog. In its characters’ endless cycle of violence, misery, trauma and rumination, all light and shade is lost. There is action in spades, but little real plot; dialogue, but little psychological nuance. We are told many of the condemned characters’ tragic backstories, often in poignantly throwaway footnotes. This is a pointed feature in itself: we recall famous fast food chains’ logos more clearly than the names and lives of brutalised Black individuals. But even so, we do not feel them or feel for them. The main characters glower like video game characters and talk like CGI bounty hunters.
Adjei-Brenyah is clearly a writer of substance, with something to say. As we anticipate later novels by him, maybe skip this one and wait instead for pop culture to eat itself, shed all irony and churn out the inevitable Netflix adaptation.
• Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is published by Harvill Secker (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
