Booker winner Marlon James’s latest book is a crazy maze of stories

I must admit that I was awaiting the arrival of Booker Prize winner Marlon James’s new book with great anticipation. The fact that the much-feted writer of A Brief History of Seven Killings was now committed to a three-part fantasy series was immensely exciting.

Black Leopard Red Wolf , the first of the Dark Star trilogy, came with some fantastic praise. It was called a “miracle”, a work worthy of Tolkien, a modern-day Beowulf , among other superlatives. If there was an exciting book out there, this was it.

The book opens with a raw, pulsating chapter. We meet the protagonist, Tracker — called so because he can smell out tracks that people try to hide. Tracker was tasked, along with his six companions — who include the Black Leopard and the Red Wolf to find a boy who went missing three years ago.

But the mission comes later. It’s in the first chapter itself that one gets the feeling of having dropped into a crazy maze of stories.

Men have their heads bashed in, a man brutally assaults his wife and child, a queen asks Tracker to retrieve her husband from the land of those who have drowned. Tracker finds his way there after bribing a crone, and in that strange land he is chased by men before he drags the drowned man back to this world.

As I paused after this chapter to catch my breath, little did I know that events, characters and places would continue to go by at this dizzying pace. Assaults, mutilations, rape, sex, creatures from myths and legends, shapeshifters, albinos, witches and much more appear fast and furious.

As I read on, at one point I had to stop and ask: Where is this story going?

The characters in the book are never what they seem as they shift identities and gender, places morph from one to the other, dreams and nightmares throw up stories and dissipate. And in the midst of this is the character of Tracker — is he a reliable warrior or an unreliable narrator?

Nothing is as it seems, no one stays in one place for too long. The quest itself begins mysteriously — why does the boy need to be found, why now after three years of his disappearance, why was he taken, why is he not dead yet, who really wants him found — but even many pages later one is left frenziedly jumping from one event to another.

There are set-pieces of breathtaking action. A woman (is she a woman?) recounts how she tried to save the child they are searching for from the Omoluzu, shadow assassins who erupt on the ceilings of rooms.

“I cut my womb open...I pushed the baby through and my skin sealed him inside.” And then — “He swung at me and I ducked. I jumped up to the ceiling, their floor, and chopped his head off with my two blades... One swung and cut me in the shoulder, but I swung around and cut his chest open.”

Africa is the centre and the heart of this fantasy, which gives the book endless mesmerising possibilities. There are descriptions of a place filled with strange rivers, dark forests, awful creatures, of mists that creep up, and kings who go to war for years on end. There is a story about abandoned Mingi children — those cast out by the tribe for possessing physical deformities.

In the book, these wraith-like children live together, looked after by a witch. James weaves this and other real and imagined African practices into the story, investing them with an aura of magic.

However, the unrelenting blood and gore and sexual assaults of humans on humans and humans on animals, as also the other way round, palls on the reader. It proves exhausting after a while, and deadening.

The book is so densely populated with characters that aside from Tracker and a few others, they slowly start melding into each other — a strange cornucopia of creatures with edges that keep disappearing.

Black Leopard Red Wolf; Marlon James; Penguin; Fiction; ₹699

Black Leopard has great patches of brilliance. It’s clear that there is prodigious imagination at work. The fantasy world set in an African landscape, indeed mindscape, is fevered and unprecedented. It could have been a true modern-day Odyssey , or, as the author has said, an African Game of Thrones .

But somewhere, like a serpent eating its own tail, it swallows itself up in its violence and gore, in not remembering that hectic storytelling needs moments of pause to be effective, that subtlety and delicacy have their place too in creating magic.

What we are left with then is a jumble of muscular writing, a world that feels plasticky and overwrought, a feeling that here is a book that could have been enthralling but finally, and resoundingly, is not.

Sudeshna Shome Ghosh is a Bengaluru-based editor

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