Reggae’s powerful voice rings through novel ‘Seven Killings’

Marlon James, who won the 2015 Man Booker Prize for his novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings” earlier this month in London, is the first Jamaican novelist to receive the United Kingdom’s most prestigious literary award.

That’s only fitting because James, who lives in the United States and teaches at Macalester College in Minnesota, brings his own powerful mix of influences and cultures to the novel, a deeply moving, powerfully rendered tour de force that reimagines the 1976 attempted assassination of Bob Marley.

Told in a cacophony of voices, “A Brief History of Seven Killings” (688 pages; Riverhead Books; $28.95) becomes an investigation of ethics and ambition, both personal and collective, with an eye toward the ways in which public spectacle intersects with private lives.

Interestingly, James does not portray Marley directly; rather, he defines him only as the Singer, a spectral presence, as much an allegory or a symbol as a human being. This is the point, of course, for James understands that the novel is most effective when it gets at layers and nuances that mere facts resist.

“At some point you gotta expand on a story,” one character, a journalist, explains. “You can’t just give it focus, you gotta give it scope.”

That’s especially true of a novel such as “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” which is historical but also not. Certainly much of what it describes is recognizable, but what sets it apart is James’ ability to create a larger set of associations, a succession of overlapping frames.

In accepting the Man Booker, James tied the whole thing back to reggae, which was for him a key access point, he explained.

“The reggae singers Bob Marley and Peter Tosh were the first to recognize that the voice coming out our mouths was a legitimate voice for fiction and for poetry,” he declared.

This is an essential notion, not just in terms of what it tells us of the role of pop culture in determining sensibility, but also because of reggae’s history of speaking up for the underclass.

The following is an excerpt of the 2014 New York Times review of James’ novel:

“ ‘A Brief History of Seven Killings’ is based in part on the real-life story of the Shower Posse, who began their rise in early-’60s Kingston and spread to America, where, by the 1980s, they controlled much of the crack trade in New York and Miami — in the book, they form an alliance with Griselda Blanco of the Medellín cartel.

“The partnership echoed another one, when Jamaica’s prime minister Edward Seaga and his Jamaica Labour Party used the gang as enforcers in the slums of Tivoli Gardens (called Copenhagen City in James’s novel), which became that party’s fief. Both the J.L.P. and their rival party, the P.N.P. (People’s National Party), had armed gangs in their service, for whoever controlled the slums controlled Kingston, and whoever won the Kingston vote won the nation’s elections.

“This turf war led to spiraling poverty and savage violence. It was the kind of trauma described and transmuted into song by the great Bob Marley (referred to in the novel as the Singer), who in 1976, amid unprecedented bloodshed, announced a free concert to promote peace in Kingston. … At the same time, outside forces including the C.I.A., anti-Castro Cubans and the Colombian drug cartels were converging on Jamaica with money and guns.

“If all this sounds confusing, it’s because it’s true. On Dec. 3, before he could give the peace concert, Marley was ambushed at his house by a band of gunmen, shot twice, and almost murdered. After that, organized crime in Jamaica went international.

“There is always too much history to keep track of — the daily news is itself an impossible barrage — and so a certain kind of novel has evolved to shape narratives out of such chaos, not to find answers, but to capture the way history feels, how it maims, bewilders, enmeshes us. …

“Spoof, nightmare, blood bath, poem, ‘A Brief History of Seven Killings’ eventually takes on a mesmerizing power. It makes its own kind of music, not like Marley’s, but like the tumult he couldn’t stop.”