Just Because: 'A Brief History of Seven Killings'

Man Booker Prize Twitter

"I'm not an easy writer to like." So says Marlon James, the first Jamaican to win Britain's esteemed Man Booker Prize, which he did on October 13. The novel for which he won, A Brief History of Seven Killings, is his third. It uses as its launching pad the 1976 attempted assassination of Jamaican musician Bob Marley. "I thought it would be considered as one of those experimental novels that no one reads," James said. But far from being unread, it has gotten rave reviews, with New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani calling it "epic in every sense of that word: sweeping, mythic, over the top, colossal and dizzyingly complex”: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/14/world/americas/marlon-james-jamaican-novelist-wins-man-booker-prize.html?_r=0

Gonna tell the truth about it,

Honey, that's the hardest part

                                      —Bonnie Raitt, Tangled and Dark

If it no go so, it go near so.

               —Jamaican proverb

Sir Arthur George Jennings

Listen.
   Dead people never stop talking. Maybe because death is not death at all, just a detention after school. You know where you're coming from and you're always returning from it. You know where you're going though you never seem to get there and you're just dead. Dead. It sounds final but it's a word missing an ing. You come across men longer dead than you, walking all the time though heading nowhere, and you listen to them howl and hiss because we're all spirits or we think we are all spirits but we're all just dead. Spirits that slip inside other spirits. Sometimes a woman slips inside a man and wails like the memory of making love. They moan and keen loud but it comes through the window like a whistle or a whisper under the bed, and little children think there's a monster. The dead love lying under the living for three reasons: (1) We're lying most of the time. (2) Under the bed looks like the top of a coffin, but (3) There is weight, human weight on top that you can slip into and make heavier, and you listen to the heart beat while you watch it pump and hear the nostrils hiss when their lungs press air and envy even the shortest breath. I have no memory of coffins.
   But the dead never stop talking and sometimes the living hear. This is what I wanted to say. When
you're dead speech is nothing but tangents and detours and there's nothing to do but stray and wander awhile. Well, that's at least what the others do. My point being that the expired learn from the expired, but that's tricky. I could listen to myself, still claiming to anybody that would hear that I didn't fall, I was pushed over the balcony at the Sunset Beach Hotel in Montego Bay. And I can't say shut your trap, Artie Jennings, because every morning I wake up having to put my pumpkin-smashed head back together. and even as I talk now I can hear how I sounded then, can you dig it, dingledoodies? meaning that the afterlife is just not a happening scene, not a groovy shindig, Daddy-O, see those cool cats on the mat? They could never dig it, and there's nothing to do but wait for the man that killed me, but he won't die, he only gets older and older and trades out wives for younger and younger and breeding a whole brood of slow-witted boys and running the country down into the ground.
   Dead people never stop talking and sometimes the living hear. Sometimes he talks back if I catch him right as his eyes start to flicker in his sleep, talks until his wife slaps him. But I'd rather listen to the longer dead. I see me in split breeches and bloody longcoats and they talk, but blood comes out of their mouths and good heavens that slave rebellion was such ghastly business and that queen has of course been of bloody awful use ever since the West India Company began their rather shoddy decline compared to the East and why are there so many negroes taking to sleeping so unsoundly wherever they see fit and confound it all I seem to have misplaced the left half of my face. To be dead is to understand that dead is not gone, you're in the flatness of the deadlands. Time doesn't stop. You watch it move but you are still, like a painting with a Mona Lisa smile. In this space a three-hundred-year-old slit throat and two-minute-old crib death is the same.
   ...