You, with your eye of a dog, me with my eyes of a cat. We are quite the pair, are we not, Tracker?
One of the things I most admired about Marlon James' Man Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings was how authentic every shifting voice was – each section could have been written by a different author. Now with Black Leopard, Red Wolf, James has given us something totally different once again: a Tolkeinesque epic fantasy set amongst the kingdoms of precolonised sub-Saharan Africa, complete with that continent's diverse folklore, monsters, and politics. In this interview James explains the inspiration for and beginnings of what will eventually become The Dark Star Trilogy, and the idea of bringing traditional African stories and storytelling into the Fantasy mainstream seems a natural and overdue project. This was maybe too long for me (but should one really complain about an epic stretching to epic length?), and it felt a bit anachronistic for characters to focus so much on feminism, gender and sexual diversity (but I acknowledge that bringing these themes into the mainstream is overdue as well), but at its core, this is a compelling and surprising quest tale that immersed me in a world I knew very little about. I would definitely pick up the next volume in the trilogy. (Note: I was fortunate to receive an ARC and the quotes here may not be in their final forms.)
The child is dead, what is left to know? Truth? Is truth only one thing in the South? Facts carry no color or shape, facts are just facts...So let me give you a story. Hear me tell you that I am just a man, whom some have called a wolf, and others worse. Did the old woman bring you different news? I know you have spoken to her. A soothsayer said the child's head was infested with devils. It was no devil, it was bad blood. I can describe his death.In its framing device, Black Leopard, Red Wolf opens with the main character – known only as Tracker – answering questions from an inquisitor (known also as the fetish priest) in a prison in the Southern Kingdom. Tracker's is the only voice we hear (although he does sometimes repeat the inquisitor's questions), and so what follows has more the feel of traditional oral storytelling than a written history. We immediately learn that Tracker had been one of a small group of mercenaries hired to find a child who had gone missing years before, and before the time of his capture, Tracker had witnessed this child's death. Starting somewhere in the middle of the tale, Tracker will eventually describe his childhood, his early friendship with a leopard who can shapeshift into a man, his uncanny ability to follow a person's scent across time and space, and his fantastical experiences with vampires, trolls, ogres, and witches in pursuit of the missing boy. Tracker often tells the inquisitor that he won't recount the story as expected, but in the end, he answers every question; tells every story of his life. (It was interesting for me to learn from that interview with James that the next volume will be the same quest told from the point-of-view of another of the captured mercenaries and that her first words will be, “Everything you read before is not true.”)
And that is all and all is truth, great inquisitor. You wanted a tale, did you not? From the dawn of it to the dusk of it, and such is the tale I have given you. You said you wanted testimony, but you wanted story, is it not true? Now you sound like men I have heard of, men coming from the West because they have heard of slave flesh, men who ask, Is this true? When we find this, shall we seek no more? It is truth as you call it, truth in entire? What is truth when it always expands and shrinks? Truth is just another story.In addition to bringing to life so many fantastical creatures, James fills this story with grit and gore. Killings are frequent, brutal, and graphically described. Tracker loses some of his companions along the way (and I had to wonder if some of the tension of peril is lost when the main character is recounting the story after the fact; we know he survives), and some of these losses are heart-wrenching. There are also plenty of graphic (mostly male on male) sex scenes, and these range from aggressively playful to touching. And in addition to a mostly combative tone throughout the tales, there is also much clever and funny repartee (especially between Tracker and Leopard). With frequent shifts in chronology, subject matter, and tone, this novel reads more like The Arabian Nights than a straight narrative, but it all serves the greater story very well: even with magic, epic fighting skills, and the aid of godlike creatures, the affairs of men are brutish and banal:
Maybe this was how all stories end, the ones with true women and men, true bodies falling into wounding and death, and with real blood spilled. And maybe this was why the great stories we told are so different. Because we tell stories to live, and that sort of story needs a purpose, so that sort of story must be a lie. Because at the end of a true story, there is nothing but waste.Like with The Lord of the Rings, the quest in this book serves a larger political structure, and it is useful to be reminded that Africa knew great civilisations, kingdoms and citystates long before the Europeans came along. But like I said before, while I do appreciate the diversity of the characters, it felt a little overt to have all the main characters be gay men (Tracker himself, being uncircumsised, is sort of nonbinary) and for the women to all decry the patriarchy in a way that felt too modern for me:
Men and their cursed arrogance. You curse, you shit, you wail, you beat women. But all you really do is take up space. As men always do, they cannot help themselves. It why they must spread their legs when they sit.Overall, however, this is a truly epic novel. I reckon it will take some years for James to complete the trilogy, but I'll be looking for it.
