One of TIME’s 100 Best Fantasy Books of All TimeWinner of the L.A. Times Ray Bradbury Prize Finalist for the 2019 National Book Award The New York Times Bestseller Named a Best Book of 2019 by The Wall Street Journal, TIME, NPR, GQ, Vogue, and The Washington Post “A fantasy world as well-realized as anything Tolkien made.” –Neil Gaiman “Gripping, action-packed….The literary equivalent of a … anything Tolkien made.” –Neil Gaiman
“Gripping, action-packed….The literary equivalent of a Marvel Comics universe.” –Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
The epic novel, an African Game of Thrones, from the Man Booker Prize-winning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings
In the stunning first novel in Marlon James’s Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child.
Tracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: “He has a nose,” people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard.
As Tracker follows the boy’s scent–from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers–he and the band are set upon by creatures intent on destroying them. As he struggles to survive, Tracker starts to wonder: Who, really, is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And perhaps the most important questions of all: Who is telling the truth, and who is lying?
Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that’s come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that’s also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both.
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Black Leopard, Red Wolf is the kind of novel I never realized I was missing until I read it. A dangerous, hallucinatory, ancient Africa, which becomes a fantasy world as well-realized as anything Tolkien made, with language as powerful as Angela Carter’s. It’s as deep and crafty as Gene Wolfe, bloodier than Robert E. Howard, and all Marlon James. It’s something very new that feels old, in the best way. I cannot wait for the next installment.
This book begins like a fever dream and merges into world upon world of deadly fairy tales rich with political magic. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a fabulous cascade of storytelling. Sink right in. I guarantee you will be swept downstream.
Could not be more excited to view this story from multiple angles in rest of the series.
If you’re thinking about picking this one up: It’s as good as you’re hoping it will be.
Oh dear – I really didn’t get on with this. I did contemplate not finishing this one but I’m not a quitter and I held out hope I’d make some connections to the characters at some point in the 500+ pages….but well I didn’t. Even at important plot points I found that I just didn’t really care what happened to them because the style of writing left me feeling so disconnected . I’m struggling to see how this will be adapted to a movie….with all the sex involving children and animals. Maybe it’s because I’m not a big fantasy reader but gurrrl this was not for me.
For me the format of this book is reminiscent of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods with multiple stories and character perspectives occurring around a central story. This is however much more violent with no discrimination about the age of any person who is raped or killed. I knew what to expect having read the author’s previous books but I will admit it was still a little jarring to read all the violent events that happened. I liked the world he created with all the various traditions, culture and history but would have appreciated if the storyline was not so challenging to follow. I know that this is the 1st book in a trilogy which will be told from the perspectives of different characters so I hope the next one will explain some of the events without being too repetitive. Overall I liked this and will read the next one in the series
I knew this book would include violence, but it was too much for me.
Exceptional novel. The language and rhythms are extraordinary. I love it.
It was incomprehensible & nonsensical.
It was so strange.
An imaginative world where magic and brutality go hand in hand. Creativity to the max. Storytelling at a heart level. It took me a long time to read. Violence is prevalent. There’s more hacking and hewing than a Norse saga. This is a saga of a different king. Brilliant.
Strange book, difficult to read, hurkie jerkie, weak
Did not enjoy it.
WOLF AT THE DOOR
Newsday, 2 JUNE 2019
AMONG Marlon James’ first encounters with a wolf was one that happened when he was six.
Not a real wolf, mercifully, but something more terrifying – the creature that appears in Little House in the Big Woods, the children’s book that made him want to write: “There were no roads. There were no people. There were only trees and wild animals who had their homes among them. Wolves lived in the Big Woods, and bears, and huge wild cats. Sometimes, far away in the night, a wolf howled. Then he came nearer, and howled again. It was a scary sound.”
Four decades later, James has published Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Billed as an African fantasy, it is a beguiling novel that inhabits yet defies its genre. The book is an immersive experience, sometimes taking the guise of a tale of mystery and terror, sometimes a quest, an epic adventure, a drama, a buddy comedy, a coming-of-age tale.
Ultimately, like the shape-shifting leopard of its title, it resolves into the simplest of cores. Here is a love story featuring black characters. A queer love story.
“I hope readers get the sweep of an epic,” James told Sunday Newsday between a string of appearances last month at the NGC Bocas Lit Fest in downtown Port of Spain. “For me, it was about writing the type of book I wanted to read. I’m a huge fan of fantasy stories, but it must be said I rarely see anybody like myself in them.”
Like his previous novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, which won the 2015 Man Booker Prize, Black Leopard, Red Wolf opens with a list of characters. Additionally, there are maps drawn by James. These prefatory materials transport us, give us a visual means of establishing the world in which the action takes place. James, who was born in Jamaica in 1970 but now lives in Minnesota, literally redraws the map.
The plot involves a slave-trader who hires a group of mercenaries, including a character called Tracker, to search for a missing boy. Instead of a rescue mission, the child is assassinated.
The facts are then put on trial. Truth is just another story, lost among a constellation of characters whose allegiances and loyalties shift like quicksand. Some things are constant.
Tracker has a powerful wolf-like nose, capable of picking up remote scents. He is also deeply in love with several male figures around him, but is only slowly coming to terms with this.
“He was the first man I could say I loved, though he was not the first man I would say it to,” he says at one point.
“I never thought I would find legitimising arguments for queerness by going back to African mythology,” James says after a quick lunch of chicken roti at the National Library on Abercromby Street. “That is the last thing I expected to find, that there have always been multiple genders, that in African traditions men were queer and were known to be queer. The fact that I could go so far back into the past and find a thing that almost justifies myself as a queer person was quite frankly a shocking and welcome surprise.
“There are people who think I was trying to score politically correct points. Or go for diversity and inclusion. No, I was just doing the research!”
A few weeks before Bocas, The New Yorker published a feature in which James candidly discussed his experience of growing up gay in Jamaica. At five, children would call him sissy. Around this time, he retreated into comics and books like Little House in the Big Woods.
As puberty hit, James tried to capitulate to the toxic masculinity around him. Students at Wolmer’s Trust High School for Boys would call him Mary. In response, he secretly practised how to “shape-shift,” to speak in a deeper voice, to sprinkle words like “bredren” and “boss” among his sentences.
Later, he fell in with an evangelical church in Kingston. At this time, the idea of writing an African fantasy with evil spirits first came to him. Meanwhile, he struggled with his gay desires. In a fraught moment, he requested an exorcism. It didn’t work. The leopard could not change its spots.
Black Leopard, Red Wolf is equally concerned with sexuality as it is with the bending of genre, the reshaping of society and the retelling of history. On the level of the sentence, it deploys a rhetorical strategy that places emphasis on language as embodying the world, and on African philosophies such as the Dogon idea of gender twinness.
Time itself works differently in this world, is associative, is dominated by the present tense.
“The child is dead. There is nothing left to know,” the book – which is meant to be the first of a trilogy – begins. In some ways, the novel’s 620 pages confirm and deny these fatalistic claims.
James litters the narrative with Yoruba, Hausa, Wolof, Fulani, and Swahili, among other languages. He peppers his plotting with suspense techniques, such as cliffhangers, moments of ratiocination in which Tracker teases out political secrets that surround the boy, and, in one instance, there is the memorable use of stream-of-conscious narration to convey the rush of sensations when Tracker has a key breakthrough. The book’s rich depictions of sexual yearning and landscape are heightened by the use of synesthetic imagery. All from a writer who infuses his prose with poetic techniques like repetition, parallelism, and parataxis (there is actually a poem at the middle of the book, and a griot’s song comprises the whole of the novel’s fifth section, perhaps in homage to JRR Tolkien).
“Whenever I start a novel, I will read poetry before I write,” James tells an audience at a Bocas panel discussion with fellow novelists Nalo Hopkinson and Karen Lord on May 4. “I particularly like War Music by Christopher Logue.” (War Music is based on Homer’s Iliad.)
At times, his novel’s story is told in a non-chronological style that betrays this poetic sensibility. Equally, the cinematographic leaps hint at the influence of writers such as Amos Tutuola, whose My Life in the Bush of Ghosts recalls the fate of a boy abandoned by his family. There are also older works looming over the proceedings such as the Epic of Sundiata, and Aeschylus’s Oresteian trilogy, which asks us to question, as Tracker does, the meaning of justice.
It’s a long book. The UK Guardian calls it “hulking,” the Independent “exhausting,” the New York Times prescribes “a little judicious pruning.” The criticism is only partly merited. Once Tracker figures out a key element of the plot, the book does appear to come to a narrative terminus.
Until, that is, James springs a remarkable closing act. By this stage, we surrender to its operatic heights.
“I wanted to write fantasy in a way in which an American or European would write fantasy, which is to look at this vast reservoir of art and knowledge and history and language and myth and legend and make something from it,” James says. “This book for me is a powerful reset. I had to change everything.” Part of the change relates to the history of British colonisation in the Caribbean and beyond.”
It was not just about researching “African stuff,” he says. “It was about reading a lot of Indian stuff too, reading the Ramayana, reading contemporary novels. Some of the novels I really went back to and read and took apart included Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, the work of Sofia Samatar. I looked to African, Asian, South-Asian writers who have found a way forward by going back to their own myths.”
In a sense, then, redefining the story has become James’ own story. In a 2015 essay for The New York Times Magazine, he came out publicly for the first time, writing: “I teach that characters arise out of our need for them. By now, the person I created in New York was the only one I wanted to be.”
With Black Leopard, Red Wolf, he has created an elaborate conceit in which a missing boy is a symbol of the protagonist’s infantile attitude to his sexuality. In a way, the unnamed boy must be transcended for Tracker to fully emerge and to embrace, without guilt, an adult self that has left childish fear behind. After a tragic development, the book’s burning question is whether it is too late for Tracker to be happy.
“Sometimes the only way forward is through,” Tracker says. “So I walked through. I was not afraid.”
— from Newsday, June 2, 2019 https://newsday.co.tt/2019/06/02/wolf-at-the-door/
This book is everything I hoped it would be. It was littered with gritty, action-packed, scenes that held no detail back. Following Tracker, the “one with the nose” (and a witty mouth), the story’s protagonist, we see him as he sets out on a manhunt for a missing boy swirling in conspiracies with a band of unlikely allies and enemies.
James’ prose pulls every so often into stories within the story, giving depth to both moments and characters.
Pulling masterfully from African folklore, the language used in this novel is completely unique and compelling. The montage of characters are all well-realized and seem as real as anything.
Though I was in a bit of a fog at some points in the story, I was pulled back into scenes with grounding detail and action.
James’ has written a barrier-breaking novel that defies what is expected and is the only thing of its kind on shelves.
Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf is one of the most challenging books I’ve read in a long time. It’s also one of the most fascinating.
Let’s start with the structure. The story is mostly told in first-person by Tracker, a bounty hunter who has “a nose” (the ability to track by scent), “an eye” (a wolf eye in place of one of his human eyes), and “a mouth” (a habit of saying caustic things). But Tracker isn’t relating his tales directly to the reader. He’s being interrogated by an Inquisitor who doubts what he’s hearing. And given Tracker’s circumstances—captured and presumably awaiting execution—there’s good reason to think he might be stretching the truth. He even drops hints that he could be lying. Early on, while relating why he left his birthplace, he says, “There are two endings” to that anecdote, and then gives both potential resolutions. Later, he remarks that, “If the gods created everything, was truth not just another creation?” And in the book’s conclusion, he outright challenges the Inquisitor (and thus the reader) to tell him if what he recounted is convincing.
James also gives us an unorthodox mystery to unravel. The first part of Black Leopard, Red Wolf deals with Tracker’s childhood and his early relationship with Leopard, a shapeshifter who can take the form of a cat. But the second part tasks them with finding a boy and saving him, and the third part depicts Tracker hunting the same boy, this time to kill him. The ultimate outcome isn’t in doubt: the novel’s first line is, “The child is dead.” The Inquisitor also summarizes these events early on. What we don’t know is how and why these things came to pass, and the twists and turns are often hard to follow, not least because the people who want the boy rescued insist on obscuring his identity. “There have been three who hired me to find this child,” Tracker tells a comrade at one point. “Between them, they have told me five stories so far of who this child is.” “They wish that you save him,” his comrade guesses, “but do not wish that you know who you save.”
Tracker’s voice lost me on occasion too. His fight-scene descriptions are jumpy, the literary equivalent of a shaky cam. Much of the dialogue is clipped (in some cases, because characters aren’t speaking in their first languages; but generally, I think James just wanted to affect a certain style). And there’s a surreal quality I found hard to engage with.
But the worldbuilding—my god, the worldbuilding. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is an African fantasy set before Europeans intrude, and there’s very little that feels “Western” about the story. The monsters are distinct (roof-walkers who stalk you from the ceiling, lightning vampires whose thralls crave their master’s charged blood, men who mutated themselves into spiders, and many more). The societies function according to different rules. The magic works in intriguing ways.
Experiencing all this is what kept me going when the mystery tangled itself in knots or the characters became too many to keep track of. I also found Tracker to be a compelling protagonist, even when he’s doing his best to be unlikable. Over the course of his narrative, we see him harden, soften, and harden again. That part of the journey makes sense.
Does the rest? I think I’d have to reread Black Leopard, Red Wolf and really study it to decide how reliable Tracker’s tales are. I might just wait for the sequels, though. Supposedly they’re going to examine the same story from different perspectives. I hope one of them is Leopard’s: he’s not in the first book quite enough to justify being a titular character. Either way, if the rest of the series reaches a similar level of genius—messy or not—I’m all in.
Content warning: I should note that Black Leopard, Red Wolf is decidedly NOT a children’s book. It contains graphic depictions of violence, sex, and rape. The scene where Tracker loses one of his human eyes is particularly brutal. This book isn’t for everyone. But I do think it’s worth reading.
(For more reviews like this one, see http://www.nickwisseman.com)
Confusing
It started out fine, but lost me about a third of the way through. The narrative shifted gears and I bailed after that. I felt at the mercy of the author’s erratic sense of his own world, like a panel of kids was making up the rules.
I don’t often quit in the middle of a book. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for this one.