“I heard you are writing an African version of my book,” George RR Martin emailed Marlon James, after the Booker prize-winning novelist told a magazine that he was going to “geek the fuck out” and write an African Game of Thrones. “George was a great sport about it,” James says.
A mashup of mythology, Middle-earth and Marvel comics, James’s Dark Star trilogy – which began with bestseller Black Leopard, Red Wolf and is now joined by Moon Witch, Spider King – is a slippery beast to summarise. Even for its author: “Damn it, if I could I wouldn’t have written such a long book,” he jokes on a video call from his home in Brooklyn. Each novel in the trilogy will tell the same story from a different perspective: Black Leopard was narrated by the mercenary Tracker; and its readers will recognise many of the characters in the new novel, including the eponymous Moon Witch, otherwise known as Sogolon. There is an evil royal host, a love story and a dizzying array of mythical characters, not to mention enough sex and gore to satisfy GoT fans. “I think writing a book should be something like reading a book, meaning I should have fun,” he says. “And it was great fun to write.”
But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be taken seriously. “We sometimes look at fantasy as child’s play, that once we get into fantastical creatures we must be telling a kids’ story,” the 51-year-old says. “There is still this idea that the social realist novel is the novel grown up, which I’ve always considered ludicrous because there are so few adult women in those novels.” He gives his big laugh. James has never been afraid of poking the literary establishment (after winning the Booker he accused the publishing industry of “pandering to white women”).
James is wearing a woolly beanie: it is freezing in New York, although he is used to the cold after 14 years in Minnesota, where he still teaches creative writing for part of the year. But the early Saturday morning sunshine picks out titles on the eclectic bookshelves behind him: Sophocles’s Theban plays, a four-volume history of the hundred years war and a compendium of punk. He has a whole shelf devoted to Kazuo Ishiguro, a particular hero. Our conversation ranges from the Incredible Hulk (“the saddest music ever in TV history”) to Rachel Cusk (“I love the unforgiving gaze”). For all the talk of Game of Thrones, two very different novels were on his desk while he was writing the new book: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. “I am in awe of those writers.”
James himself has been compared to everyone from Charles Dickens to David Foster Wallace, with Quentin Tarantino thrown in (he much prefers Jane Austen). But such acclaim was a long time coming. His first novel, John Crow’s Devil, about two rivalrous priests and set in rural 1950s Jamaica, was rejected 78 times before finally being published in 2005. His second, The Book of Night Women, a brutal 18th-century slave narrative and “easily one of the best Jamaican novels ever written” according to a critic in this paper, was turned down 20 times. “It’s a hell of a thing when you’re not white enough to write a black novel,” James wrote in 2006, pointing out that a white man (Yann Martel) had won the 2002 Booker prize for a novel about an Indian (Life of Pi). In 2015, he became the first Jamaican to win the Booker for his next novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, which used a cast of more than 70 narrators to circle around the attempted murder of Bob Marley in 1976 like a record on a turntable: the New Yorker called it “a kaleidoscopic, coke-spiked Our Mutual Friend”.
A Brief History of Seven Killings was followed by Black Leopard, Red Wolf, which his editors feared might be “too sci-fi for the literary crowd and too literary for the sci-fi crowd”. They needn’t have worried: the novel received rave reviews (even from the New York Times’ much-feared Michiko Kakutani) and is being made into a film by Black Panther star Michael B Jordan. It wasn’t such a departure as it might seem. Creating a vast cast of diaspora characters during a turbulent year for Jamaica, Brief History led him to ask: “How did we get to this point? What is it that we don’t have? I thought, well we don’t have a mythology. We don’t have an origin narrative,” he explains. “If you play rock’n’roll, sooner or later you have to go back to the blues.”
So he started obsessively researching African folklore. To say that his mythical world is set in Africa “is like saying Lord of the Rings is set in Europe”, he points out. “I’m writing an African world but I’m also a Jamaican and I’m also in the diaspora,” he says. “You can tell it went through the Jamaican blender.”
James describes his upbringing in the town of Portmore, outside Kingston, as “very middle class and suburban”. “If you grew up in the 80s anywhere in the world you had the same childhood,” he says. “We were all raised by TV, thinking we were cool by saying we were listening to the Smiths but really we were listening to Madonna.” Both his parents were in the police force: his father (who died in 2012) left to become a lawyer, his mother was a detective. “She puts them in jail, he takes them out,” was a running family joke.
He read whatever he could get his hands on – “the only category I needed for a book was ‘next’” – coming late to classic fantasy fiction simply because there wasn’t a drugstore paperback of The Lord of the Rings. Instead he gorged on film tie-ins, fairytales and comics. He attended the “posh” school, where he always felt a bit of an outsider. It was this sense of “having to negotiate a world you don’t belong to”, that he associated with Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell, and which he gives to Sogolon and also to the ambitious Nina Burgess in A Brief History, the character closest to him, he says.
James was gay in an overwhelmingly macho culture (sex between men is still illegal in Jamaica), though he assumed this was “just a phase” that he would grow out of by the time he reached his 17th birthday. “Man, poor 17! I hinged a lot on that year. And it didn’t happen.” So he turned to the church, which gave him “all sorts of equipment for pushing it aside”. Church was the first place he came out, an “electrifying” experience initially, but then it was “now let Jesus change you”. An “exorcism” in his early 30s – “basically preachers locking you into a room to drive out the gay” – relieved him of his faith but not his sexuality. “Funnily enough, the exorcism made me more gay.”
Although he didn’t go looking for it, researching for Black Leopard and Moon Witch, he was shocked to find so much queerness in African mythology: “These are queer characters, this character – he gay!” he says. “We were way more open and accepting of all these things before. Everything was cool until contemporary Christianity told them ‘no’.” He’s not a fan of fantasy as allegory, which usually means reinforcing Judaeo-Christian beliefs of good and evil – “I wanted to write characters that stood against all that” – but this novel unwittingly came to present his vision of an “idealised world”, full of non-binary characters and a wild pluralism of body forms. It is both ancient and very 21st century. “Some people neither night nor day,” Keme, Sogolon’s lover and father of her children tells her, as he reveals himself to her ashalf-lion, half-man in a moving scene where James says he felt the safest to be himself. “It mirrors my shapeshifting and the realisation that I wasn’t necessarily trying to go from one point to another point. I kind of like this midway.”
His fascination with shapeshifting goes back to his early love of comics and has continued ever since. In a much-shared piece in the New York Times entitled From Jamaica to Minnesota to Myself, written in 2015 after the publication of Brief History, he described “peeling New York off his skin”, by changing out of his hoop earrings and skinny jeans in public toilets, Clark Kent-style, before meeting Jamaican relatives or boarding a plane back to Kingston. A gay Jamaican writer nearly a decade younger told James recently that he didn’t identify with his piece at all: “I said, ‘Dude, you have no idea how happy that makes me,’” James says now. “I wrote that article hoping for a day when you’d never have to read that article any more.”
He no longer feels the need to literally change outfits: “My mother is still very much alive and I am still very much out. We find a way of dealing with it.” But as a Black man living in America, “code-shifting” is still part of his everyday life: “My white friends speak to their friends the same way they speak to their family, the same way they speak to their employer. They never have the self-consciousness to think: ‘OK – stop, adjust language, speak.’ Whereas I do it all the time.”
Back when James was struggling to find a publisher in the late 90s, he was infuriated by the vogue for cultural appropriation in fiction: had he been white, his first novel, John Crow’s Devil, would have been sold as “a feat of narrative ventriloquism”, he says, a phrase he has always hated “because it means somebody that makes us a dummy”. Writers of colour who did get published had to stick to particular narratives, the colonial legacy or the immigrant experience, and “everyone had to talk about the sweet smell of jasmine in the air, and the characters couldn’t be cranky or a complete pain in the ass”. Even today there is a pressure to write stories with some sort of “uplift,” he says. “You can’t be a black Dennis Cooper or Kathy Acker. We don’t talk about it a lot, but we should.”
One evening he and a bunch of other writers drew up a drunken list of novels they vowed never to write: a coming-of-age novel (he may be having second thoughts on this one); a campus novel; and a mid-life crisis novel, “because the world doesn’t need another novel about a straight man having a 20-year-old girlfriend”.
For writers outside the establishment, even “something that seems fresh can also seem like another formula,” he says now in regard to his comments after the Booker, about the kinds of stories found in magazines like the New Yorker – “older mother or wife sits down and thinks about her horrible life”; literary heresy at a time when this sort of writing was hailed as the antidote to the big male beasts of late 20th‑century American fiction. “That was a warm time for me because I got in a lot of fights,” he says. “There is nothing wrong with the-suburban-white-woman-experiences-ennui story, if we are going to have to tolerate hundreds of bored-white-men-staring-at-their-penises stories. But you know what? We are bored with that shit.”
Things have changed “tremendously” in the seven years since he won the Booker. Young writers such as Raven Leilani, Carmen Maria Machado, Eloghosa Osunde might not have been published 20 years ago, he says. “It’s Black voices, it’s Black, queer voices. God bless Black lesbians who are having a grand old time!” But he thinks the stories told by all writers “have gotten wider and broader and deeper. I think we have become more diverse and more open-minded readers.”
A lot of bad stuff happens to poor Sogolon over 177 years and 600 or so pages. There are an awful lot of references to “koos” (female genitalia). But none of James’s fiction shies away from sex and bloodshed. He acknowledges he is “walking a tightrope” between an unflinching stare and “a pornography” of violence. As he says: “Are you writing a novel full of sexists and cruelty to women or are you writing a sexist novel? I think a lot of novels don’t know the difference.”
“Violence is violent and sex is sexy,” he says. “You are supposed to be appalled.” We have been “conditioned to see violence without suffering” by action movies and TV. The same goes for the “elegant suffering” in literary fiction: “Have you ever been with somebody who is about to die from cancer? The room smells, it’s not elegant. Dying is not cute.” And too many writers are guilty of what he terms “space-break sex” – coyly closing the bedroom door. “It is very easy for literary authors to write boring sex or unrewarding sex, or what I call indie-movie sex,” he says. “Intimacy is not a taboo.”
Shapeshifting as a writer once again, James has just completed a six-part Channel 4 TV series, Get Millie Black, about a Jamaican detective who returns to London on the trail of a missing person case: “She’s not based on my mum, whatever my mum might think.” Though he likes to believe some of the detective work has “rubbed off” on him. “I am my mother’s child,” he says. “I look at writing as a mystery that I have to solve. I start with a character and follow them.”
Then it is back to his fantastical Africa for the final instalment of the Dark Star trilogy. Fans of Black Leopard, Red Wolf are already asking whose version we should believe, Tracker’s or Sogolon’s? “I’m like, ‘Dude that’s up to you, because I’m never telling you.’”
Moon Witch, Spider King by Marlon James is published by Hamish Hamilton on 3 March, £20. James will appear at the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on 2 March. Southbankcentre.co.uk
