You sense that Marlon James’s Booker-winning success with 2015’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, centred on the attempted assassination of Bob Marley, gave him carte blanche for this wildly indulgent left turn, the first instalment of an epic fantasy trilogy set in ancient Africa, in which a band of supernatural mercenaries hunt a lost boy last seen in the company of demonic blood-drinking bandits.
It’s pretty grisly stuff, with violent sex, a stratospheric body count and various other lurid horrors, often relating to children, strewn casually on just about every other page — at one point, for instance, we see a boy, bred by man-eating trolls as a sacrifice to their gods, hanging from a tree, still alive as they roast his severed leg on a spit.
There’s much, much more where that came from, with the gore serving as perverse bait for what eventually emerges as a kind of tricked-out detective story. The narrator, Tracker, in his mid-twenties for most of the book, is a hunter whose superpower is an extraordinary sense of smell. Together with a 300-year-old witch, a giant and a shape-shifting male leopard, he searches for the missing boy in a quest that involves gumshoe work in opium dens and brothels as well as, say, trying to avoid sleep so as not to have an evil demon infiltrate his “dream jungle”, or jousting with blade-wielding spirits that form themselves out of spilled blood.
It has been reported that Black Panther star Michael B Jordan has already bought the film rights, which would well suit James’s special-effects descriptions (a puddle transforming into a woman, witches emerging from the ground) and combat-scene paragraphs of dodging and punching in which unexpected arrow-shots have a habit of arriving in time to get Tracker out of a fix.
Yet the excitement generated by the novel’s thickets of X-rated Tolkienese tends to be more stop-start than page-turning. When Tracker wakes from a dream that seems no less outlandish than the novel’s reality, it’s a typically disorientating moment; as a reading experience, it has a sink-or-swim quality, partly because of the dazzling profusion of names and creatures, coupled with James’s purist avoidance of hand-holding devices like speech tags.
You feel, too, that where A Brief History... supplied James with compelling raw material, what he’s given himself here is instead a set of sword-and-sorcery genre expectations to honour or disrupt, which feels more contrived: there’s a sudden earnestness when Tracker’s male love interest tackles him on his mummy-issues misogyny, or when the plot finally turns on a monarch’s bid to keep women out of power.
Still, it’s testament to the novel’s crazy vitality that when it ends with a teaser for the sequel — by the sounds of it, a kind of Rashomon-like retread of events from the witch’s point of view — you’re left with a whetted appetite rather than groaning with surfeit.
Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James (Hamish Hamilton, £20)
