A Brief History of Seven Killings

Wow. I have finished it! what a book. I'm both annoyed by it, in love with bits of it and frustrated by the last 350 pages of it.  To be honest if it was half the length I think it would have been a much, much better book.  

The first half was brilliant with the immersion into Jamaican gang violence, drug culture and ghetto lifestyle in the 70s. Even the Jamaican patois didn't give me no bombocloth r'asscloth fuckery.  (Translation: it was fine!) getting into the lifestyle, politics, grimness and culture of Kingston  just as Bob Marley was becoming a world music icon was just brilliant.   I loved the characters, the language and the brilliant sense of time and place. The  political angle with the CIA getting involved with Jamaican politics just to stop the Cubans getting a foothold in the country was cool too. ( something I knew nothing about. ) 

Marlon James can write, that is not under question. Every chapter was the voice of a different character and each character ( if they survived ) grew and changed over the 13 years of the book's narrative.  But every character was unremittingly grim and after the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1979, there ceased to be any more  plot. Everything just turned into 'scenes' and grabbed dialogue.  It was all a bit empty for me and has left me cold. No one, absolutely no one was redeemable.  But James did  write absolutely fantastic streams of consciousness when people were dying or shooting up places. The emptiness of their consciousnesses was just harrowing and bloody amazing to read. 

 This is not a book for the faint hearted, or anyone who wants characters to feel any redemption.  This book is hard and brutal in the hardest and most brutal terms. The only joy really was a short chapter in the middle where one of the gang leaders, because he has moved to New York to expand his crack cocaine business, finally comes to terms with himself being gay and what that actually means for him in his role as head of the gang. ( He's still hard as fuck. He just likes himself a  little bit more!) 

This book is grim with no let up and the second half reads like a shaggy dog story that just got on my nerves. But the first half, before Bob Marley dies of cancer ( after the attempted murder.)  is brilliant and it annoys me that the book lost direction for me after that. Too clever for its own sake I think and far too depressing and unremittingly bleak for me. Oh well, at least  I can attempt to swear like a Jamaican now if I want to.