Excess in A Brief History of Seven Killings

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Marlon James's 2014 novel A Brief History of Seven Killings just received the 2015 Man Booker Prize for fiction. While James is celebrated as the first Jamaican to win the prestigious award, Caribbean literary critics have received the book itself with mixed feelings. I have had conversations with fellow Caribbeanists and students in which they have used terms like "orgiastic" and "masturbatory" to describe James's writing. In her essay "Marlon James's Savage Business," Nadia Ellis builds on James' acknowledgement of his debt to Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives (hence her title) to describes A Brief History as "a wild and an important novel that takes many risks."1 But these are risks that—to Ellis's mind unsatisfactorily—depart from some of the traditional narrative paradigms and politics of Caribbean writing.2 Despite her tentative admiration for aspects of the openly gay James's novel, Ellis is ultimately critical of what she calls its "poetics of excess," which she locates in both its page length and its tendency to combine sexuality and violence.

Taking Ellis's two criticisms together, I argue that A Brief History's formal complexity is inseparable from its "poetics of excess," a point suggested by James's explicit references, in the novel's Acknowledgements, of debts not only to Bolaño but to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.  Just as Faulkner's formal excesses were integral to his critique of the American South, James's excesses provide the substance of a critique of nationalism—specifically, the politics of nationalist sovereignty as they have been negotiated in Caribbean writing since the early twentieth century.3 For me, A Brief History is thrilling in its excess, because its referential, seemingly haphazard and overwhelming narrative framework on the one hand participates in broad critique of (late) global multicultural capitalism and on the other hand, eschews much of the dignifying, empowering and ostensibly liberating national politics that we may have come to expect from a novel written by a Jamaican.

A Brief History is almost 700 pages long, and its length hints—as Ellis recognizes—at numerous other forms of excess within the narrative itself. It utilizes 12 different narrators (15 if you count Nina Burgess' 3 monikers) to bring to life a mid-seventies political moment in the Caribbean that was implicitly global: the attempt on the life of a character referred to only as The Singer—clearly a stand-in for Bob Marley—is inextricable from covert CIA Cold War ops across the region and the civil disturbances created by the OPEC crisis and its antecedents. The book is prefaced by a four-page long survey of its twenty-six member "Cast of Characters," and its narrators include various Jamaican gang leaders and members, a middle-class woman from Kingston, a dead politician, a Rolling Stone reporter, a CIA agent, and a Cuban bomb maker who freelances for the CIA, among others. All of the events that constitute the present of the narrative unfold over the course of five separate days (two in 1976, and one each in 1979, 1985, and 1991 respectively), in Kingston, Montego Bay, Miami, and New York. There are also far more than seven killings in the novel; its title is among the ways the novel mischievously teases its readers. The "seven" in the title refers not to the novel's total death toll, but to its account of the deaths of seven out of the eight attempted assassins (one man disappears). To note that A Brief History is a dizzying read is to engage in serious understatement.

For Ellis, A Brief History's excesses are worrisome because they steer away from "bright sparks" of the "first empire-strikes-back generation," which includes Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming, and Sam Selvon. As she rightly notes, this generation of writers "made of Caribbean English a whole new language, refashioning the tools of the literary tradition foisted upon them."4 She raises the legacy of this generation of writers, particularly as it relates to the refashioning of literary traditions through vernacular innovations, in contrast to what she imagines as James' unsuccessful deployment of a similar kind of oppositionally oriented vernacular refashioning. She writes that