Review of Black Leopard Red Wolf by Marlon James
New York: Riverhead, 2019. 620 pp.
This wild African-flavored fantasy is the most original book I have read this year. Marlon James has created a complete world of unique magic. Comparisons to Tolkien aren’t going too far. Although author Marlon James wrote of research and sources in the Acknowledgments, it’s hard to believe that the whole tapestry wasn’t composed entirely of James’s steaming brain waves. One caution: it’s extremely violent, too violent for me, really. In a novel less brilliant and otherwise fascinating, I wouldn’t have read further than page eight, where the narrator demolishes his own father:
I charged at him . . . dived to the ground with my hands, turned my hands to feet, and flipped up, spun my whole body like a wheel with my legs in the air, spun towards him and locked him with my two feet around his neck and brought him down hard. His head smacked the ground so loud that my mother outside heard the crack.
This may be the first novel to achieve the heart-thumping, breakneck, graphic level of violence that fans find in video games, but it has much more to recommend it. The fight with his father ends with the narrator homeless, at the beginning of an epic journey to find a child of royal blood while his heart continues to long for a bunch of discarded children of other abilities that he had to leave behind. The novel has moments of gruff and guarded tenderness, too.
With any luck, our current taste for lurid violence will pass on soon, leaving behind at least this one work of transcendent literary art.
