His novel, published this week, has been getting the kinds of reviews that prize judges remember. James is deeply troubled by the world as it enters the third year of the Trump administration, but also considers himself a fortunate man, whether it’s being able to live openly gay or write at a time when a so-called ‘literary’ author can freely take on fantasy or other genres. “Not every story appears to you ‘A to Z,’” he explains. Sign up for The Gleaner’s morning and evening newsletters. But once he “stumbled” upon the character he came to call ‘Tracker’, a new narrative was born. For Black Leopard, he had planned a story of the fall of a royal house and its mad queen. For A Brief History, he says, the first words he wrote ended up on page 458. He might write hundreds of pages before one character’s voice so compels him that he starts all over. A James novel is a work in progress to the very end. The novel’s digressive path, with detours becoming main roads and main roads detours, mirrors the writing of it. Black Leopard, Red Wolf features a hunter for hire named Tracker, whose pursuit of a missing boy extends over 600 pages of warfare, sex, shape-shifting, and plotting in a landscape filled with monsters and witches, and ever taller tales. His current book is a fantastical vision of ancient Africa that has been likened to Game of Thrones and is the first of a planned Dark Star trilogy. He has unearthed monsters everywhere, from a colonial-era plantation to the house of Bob Marley. “Ah! ‘Monstrum is a divine messenger of catastrophe.’ A monster is a harbinger.”Īuthor of four novels, notably the Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, the 48-year-old James has made an art of “finding what would rather stay lost,” as he writes in his new work, Black Leopard, Red Wolf. What does ‘monstrum’ mean?” the novelist asks, seated at a Brooklyn coffee house, briefly forgetting the meaning before looking it up in a novel he’s been reading. It makes me think of the Latin root of monsters, ‘monstrum’. Marlon James is in search of a definition.

Marlon james new book