#Title

OPINION

The dangerous game of Marlon James
Can genre fiction be great literature?
DESIGN: MAISHA SYEDA
Authors of genre know exactly the Faustian pact they make when they enter the genre game: Your books will sell and make money, perhaps even get lucrative TV or film deals, but they will never be mentioned by your high school English teacher as required reading, graduate students will not pore over your career to write dissertations on meaning and truth that can be decoded from your work, and you will never be up for a Nobel prize.
ABAK HUSSAIN
Salman Rushdie often recalls that early on in his career, he realised that he could not write about India in “cool, Forsterian English” a la A Passage to India , because India was not cool, she was hot, and her story needed to be told in a new kind of hot, grimy, chaotic language.
This early confidence in this newly forged voice, made flesh and blood through the smart-mouth narrator Saleem Sinai, allowed him to put down on paper the piece of literary audacity that was Midnight’s Children (1981 ) . If Rushdie back then knew how to write hot, today Marlon James—a self-professed Rushdie fan–turns the oven up a few degrees, and comes close to burning down the kitchen … along with the paternalistic authority of the Anglo-American literary world in dictating what an English novel should look and sound and smell like.
James, like Rushdie, is a supremely skilled stylist of English prose in all its forms—and he is perfectly capable of writing in the straight and narrow, that is, if he wants to. But he doesn’t want to. This defiance, along with his hypnotic skill, blinding originality, and willingness to break every rule in the book makes him a force impossible to ignore.
With a Booker prize behind his back and two-thirds of the way into a fantasy trilogy somewhat superficially dubbed an “African Game of Thrones ,” Marlon James is, right now, the hot one to watch in the game of novels.
Tear down this wall
When James won the 2015 Man Booker Prize for his third novel A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), he was on top of the world, and could have chosen to do just about anything next. Fresh off the Booker win, with all doors opening for him, he turned in a direction few could have predicted, except a handful of insiders who were already aware of James’s childhood interests—high fantasy.
From a very traditionalist point of view, this looks like not just a mere thematic departure, but a breaking of the barrier between that which is somewhat snootily referred to as “literary fiction” or simply “literature,” and “genre fiction,” the latter understood to be belonging to a lower order of entertainment, i.e. thrillers, romances, horror, science fiction, fantasy, in other words, books written quickly to tell an absorbing story but written without much style or grace.
A piece of genre fiction has a clear and utilitarian purpose–you have that specific itch, for, say, a spy thriller, you purchase a Tom Clancy, digest it in the morning, forget it by evening, and even without a doctor’s prescription, the book can do no harm.
Authors of genre know exactly the Faustian pact they make when they enter the genre game: Your books will sell and make money, perhaps even get lucrative TV or film deals, but they will never be mentioned by your high school English teacher as required reading, graduate students will not pore over your career to write dissertations on meaning and truth that can be decoded from your work, and you will never be up for a Nobel prize.
Genre titans like George RR Martin, JK Rowling, and Dan Brown will have to cry into their truckloads of cash with the knowledge that the literary establishment will never see their work as great literature.
Or so went the narrative.
Recent years have seen a gradual erosion of this wall separating genre and lit-fic. Writers like Yann Martel, Margaret Atwood, and Eleanor Catton, all Booker winners and therefore qualifying as writers of “literature,” have been at one time or other criticised as populists of a lesser order, or at best as slightly-elevated genre writers who play a delicate dance.
These criticisms have been losing their power. After all, novels are meant to be read, pages are meant to be turned, so is it really so bad to be accessible and easily digestible? Catton, to be fair, is not “easy” (simply due to the size of her book), but her Booker-winner The Luminaries does, sort of, fall into the murder mystery-romance category.
Still, so far, unstable as the border between the two worlds may be, there has been a semblance of one. Marlon James is the next step to tearing it down—here I truly believe the novel is having a very special moment.
Unlike previous writers who flirted with the blurred lines, James’s transgression is more complete, and without apology. Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019) and Moon Witch, Spider King (2022) are the first two books in James’s Dark Star trilogy. Here we have a sprawling fantasy epic set in Africa. There are vampires and river dragons and grass trolls and water nymphs and a long roster of creatures too bizarre to explain or visualise. But when is the story taking place? Is it pre-colonial Africa? Is it a parallel Africa that might have been if not for the colonial overlords cutting up the territory into irrational chunks? This is not clear.
He is playing a dangerous game: By tossing Black Leopard, Red Wolf and Moon Witch, Spider King at the literary establishment, and promising a third book in the pipeline, James seems to be saying to the establishment, to the same generous folks who once gave him the Booker and propelled him to the stratosphere: Go ahead and say this is not literature, I dare you.
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Abak Hussain is a journalist and former editor of the Editorial and Op-Ed pages at Dhaka Tribune . He is a director of Talespeople, a creative start-up, and a winner of the Iceland Writers Retreat Alumni Award.