The 2015 Man Booker Prize was announced on Tuesday, with the winner being Jamaican author Marlon James for his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings. James is the first Jamaican writer to win the Man Booker, and his victory marks Year Two of “Americans allowed in, no American wins”, in itself a satisfaction to both those who opposed the change in eligibility rules and also those who contended that the rule change would not necessarily lead to a clean sweep of the board by USians.
It’s fair to say that James’ win was a surprising result – the literary review pages, not to mention bookmaking agencies, had his book at low-to-middling odds, well behind the hot favourite, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life and the other serious contenders, Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways and Tom Carthy’s Satin Island.
James’s book is, at its most reduced level, a fictionalised account of the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976 in Jamaica, and the events that lay behind it and flowed from it. That brief precis doesn’t really capture the ambition or scope of this book, however, and only hints at the extreme violence and multi-focal reach that permeates it – content which has been variously described as “mythic”, “dazzling”, “disturbing”, “epic” and “dizzingly complex”.
It’s a book that contains more than 75 characters, and spans 30 years and three continents. It’s about poverty, reggae, and surveillance, and the CIA; it’s about gang warfare, drugs, Jamaica, colonialism, and ghosts. It is frequently lyrical, and even more frequently profane. It has incredible passages that transcend, such as this description of a ghetto in Kingston:
“The Third World slum is a nightmare that defies belief or facts, even the ones staring right at you. A vision of hell that twists and turns on itself and grooves to its own soundtrack … You visit a ghetto, particularly a ghetto in West Kingston, and it immediately leaves the real to become this sort of grotesque, something out of Dante or the infernal painting of Hieronymous Bosch…”
It also has passages – a lot of them – that are so disjointed as to be nothing but a string of confusion as the reader tries to catch up with a) who is speaking b) where they fit in and c) what the hell they are talking about.
It hasn’t been a huge crowd favourite, but reviewers, on the whole, have been impressed: Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times holds the book up as “a testament to Mr. James’s vaulting ambition and prodigious talent”, while Kei Miller in The Guardian is favourably inclined, despite noting that “If one were to be curmudgeonly, one might say that A Brief History is slightly more impressive for its ambition than its accomplishment.”
Miller also notes that A Brief History is “sometimes more impressive than it is easily enjoyable”. As a reader who fully intended to get through this text, but didn’t, I endorse this framing completely. The incessant head-hopping, language and stylistic changes, and of course the frank brutality, make this not a pleasant read; while there is no doubt it is a skilful book, it isn’t really a fun one.
Beyond analysis of the virtues and shortcomings of the book itself, however, there is a discussion to be had about what characteristics literary critics and prize judges value in a novel, and how this might serve to advantage some kinds of stories over others.
Michael Wood, the chair of the judging panel, in describing the judges’ reasons for picking it, enthused that A Brief History was “the most exciting” of the books on the shortlist, which in itself raises some questions about what constitutes excitement for literary judges. The shortlist, with the exception of Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread, was a fairly grim and disturbing catalogue; if excitement (and engagement?) was the key criteria in picking a winner, then it seems that this is being used as shorthand for “the most visceral” or even “the most violent”. Once again, the Booker has been carried off by a book that is about the uses of violence to stand in for ethical action, and to assert (usually, if not always) male dominance in the world.
A story about Rastafarianism and the CIA might seem worlds away from the World War II theme of last year’s winner, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, or Hilary Mantel’s 2012 Thomas Cromwell novel, Bring Up the Bodies. In many ways it is, of course, and I am not contending that these books are all peas in a pod. But the linking meta-theme that runs through all of the past decade of Booker winners, with the exception of 2005’s The Sea, is this: male identity and its relationship to violence.
Many of the books that have won the Booker over the past 10 years take non-conventional approaches to this question, or subsume it under other themes – Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question, for instance, is darkly comic and also primarily about anti-Semitism, while Anne Enright’s The Gathering turns the question inwards to look at self-harm as a manifestation of male struggle. My personal favourite Booker victor of the last decade, Julian Barnes’ 2011 winner, The Sense of an Ending, is subtle and reflective and does not feature overt violence, although emotional violence as a shaper of male selfdom is present.
What this might mean for how judges consider weight and merit in literary fiction is a subject that is worth interrogating. Every Booker shortlist over the past decade has featured at least one, and usually more than one, books that do not focus on, or even address, male identity and violence. Every Booker shortlist has had at least one or two, and sometimes as many as four, books that centre themes such as self-actualisation, family, and mysticism. Several of the shortlists have included books that prioritise the female gaze, and female identity, and de-emphasise violence if they use it at all (in particular, Marilynne Robinson’s Lila from this year’s list, Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves from last year’s, and AS Byatt’s 2009 The Children’s Book come to mind). One particularly potent shortlistee interrogates male violence from the viewpoint of a mother of a murdered victim – Jesus (Colm Toibin’s slender but powerful The Testament of Mary).
Despite the availability of quality works that do not equate “violent” with “exciting”, however, the Man Booker over the past decade has been dominated by winners that do examine the (undoubtedly intriguing) relationship between violence and identity, particularly male identity. There seems to be a view that works can only be considered serious if they feature some form of violence; the lightness of being, the range of human behaviours and sensibilities that are shaped in gentleness or lovingkindness are represented as somehow less important, less “real”, than those delivered with a knife, or a fist, or a belt.
A Brief History of Seven Killings is an ambitious, clever, stimulating book. Was it the best book from this year’s shortlist? Perhaps, perhaps not. Was it the kind of book that judges of prizes like this characterise as valuable? Yes, just as fellow shortlistees A Little Life, The Fishermen, and The Year of the Runaways were – stories in which meaning is made and transmitted in acts of violence, stories that centre the male experience of power and violence shaping identity and the world. That these are not unimportant stories should go without saying. Are they the only stories that can or should matter, though?