Sipped Ink vol 7 issue 6

Greetings fellow readers, and welcome to the penultimate issue of this summer’s Sipped Ink newsletter; I hope you enjoyed what I thought was a really strong section of the novel. I’ve had fun mixing up the way I approach these newsletters a bit, and this week I’m going to try something a little different again. A few days ago I watched an excellent interview with Marlon James from the 2016 Chicago Humanities Festival, and I’d like to include notes from that by way of exploring some structural elements of the novel.

To an extent I feel vindicated in my prediction (see vol 7 issue 2) that James would structure the novel in a kind of hourglass shape: tightening towards the attack on Marley’s house, and then exploding out from there. What I had not foreseen — and perhaps this was inattentiveness on my part given the particulars of the front matter — was quite how expansive the latter half of the novel would get. Not only have we found ourselves, this week, in the mid-80s, we have also travelled away from Jamaica. It’s been an interesting shift, and though it is no doubt a substantial novel, my experience as we near the end of A Brief History of Seven Killings has been to wish that there was yet more exploration to come.

I am reminded of the structure of David Simon’s TV series The Wire (2002-2008), which over the course of ~60 hours, and five seasons of television, sought to explore the complexities of turn-of-the-century Baltimore. Simon’s project is very deliberately constructed so that it introduces a new ‘layer’ each season: drug dealers & police; dockworkers & unions; politicians; schools; the press. By contrast — and with the caveat that there is still a little way to go — the 686 pages of James’s novel feels less deliberate, a little looser. For example, as we’ve moved from Jamaica to New York, it has felt to me as though the thread of international CIA intervention has slackened, and James has turned his eye instead to the dawn of the US crack epidemic. In the aforementioned interview, James hints that he may not be done exploring the branches of this story. Indeed, he says he has considered not revisiting the same characters, but the same period with different people: for example another novel of 1970s Jamaica, but centred around the country’s middle class.

It’s worth sharing some other highlights from that interview (though I recommend watching the full hour if you can). It surprised me, for instance, that James — a self-professed ‘Jane Austen nut’ — began writing his prior novel (The Book of Night Women (2009)) in standard English, before finding that it simply didn’t work for the story he was trying to tell. It is interesting that patois is so stigmatised as ineloquent, unlearned speech that James would not consider it as a mode of written expression until he’d exhausted the other possibility. Likewise, it is impossible to conceive of a version of A Brief History of Seven Killings that didn’t employ patois extensively. Similarly, James admits to having attempted — for no less than two years of writing — to compose A Brief History of Seven Killings as a linear narrative.

If it was left up to me this would be a 600 page novel about a sexually conflicted, gay hitman with boyfriend trouble.

Again, he phrases his eventual decision to embrace the discursive, multi-threaded structure in terms of authenticity:

It’s the Caribbean man; we can’t tell our stories that way.

And it is this profusion of perspectives that allows James to play with comparative truths. As we have gone further through the novel we have seen how the various narratives diverge, and the reader is tasked with determining an objective truth from the gestalt. As Marlon James puts it:

Weeper’s narrative of his life is totally different to Tristan Phillips’ narrative of Weeper.

We might compare the various evolutions of Nina Burgess, who we encounter again this week under yet another name, in yet different circumstances. Indeed, I have found the ‘odd couple’ dynamic between ‘Dorcas Palmer’ and Ken Colhirst to be a relatively rare vein of some levity in the novel (at least until its tragic turn).

It’s been a while since we talked about some of the stylistic choices James is making in his prose. Over the last couple of weeks’ reading I’ve been particularly struck by the choice to have Tristan Phillips’s chapters as a conversation with Alex Pierce, though with only the former’s dialogue relayed to the reader. It works for us, in part, because we have a good amount of experience of Alex’s own voice. Whilst it’s a shame in some respects that we don’t witness it first hand, it’s interesting to observe the further evolution of Alex, away from his initial incompetence, from Tristan’s perspective. And it’s in one of these chapters that we get a fascinating meta moment of commentary on the project not just of Alex Pierce’s proposed book, but doubtlessly on Marlon James’s novel as well. There is a comment on both the promise of the enterprise, maybe even the purpose behind it:

People need to know. They need to know I guess that, that there was this one time when we could’a do it, you know? We could’a really do it. (p568)

But also a note of caution about the chances of success, and the daunting scope of the real challenge:

watch me asking you to write the whole four-hundred-year reason why my country will always be trying not to fail. (p569)

This returns us to James’s idea for a subsequent novel centred on a different stratum of Jamaican society. He obviously shares the opinion of Tristan Phillips, that there is far more to the story than he is able to tell even employing a dozen narrators. A question on which James seems to diverge from Phillips, however, is on who the author of this story should be. Phillips says to Pierce:

Maybe somebody should put all of this craziness together, because no Jamaican going do it. No Jamaican can do it, brother, either we too close or somebody going stop we. (p568)

The very existence of A Brief History of Seven Killings suggests that Marlon James disagrees. We discussed last issue some of the ways in which he might feel excluded from Jamaican society, and yet in the Chicago Humanities Festival interview he frames the exercise of writing (not just this book, but also his previous work) as the work of ‘reclaiming erased space’ culturally. It is, he argues, uniquely the province of a Caribbean writer to tell these stories, and to do so to the extent possible in a manner authentic to their origin.

Next week: the final issue of this summer’s newsletter, as we reach the end of A Brief History of Seven Killings. What further narrative twist or structural innovation does this ambitious novel still hold in store for us? Let’s talk about it here, next Sunday. Have a good week!

PS. A couple of additions to the playlist¹ this week, including the best song yet mentioned in the novel 😉

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1. this playlist has subsequently been deleted  ↩︎