The Disappearers. Eight stories of homophobia, ranging from tenderness to brutality, in Marlon James’s novel

“Why not say it? With this novel about the gay experience and murderous homophobia in Jamaica in the 1980s and 1990s, Marlon James has written a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and perhaps of the century.” Such a review is not often encountered, especially in a newspaper as staid and authoritative as The New York Times. The novel in question is The Disappearers by Marlon James, which, later in the review, critic Dwight Garner compares to the masterpieces of William Faulkner, “with the difference that Faulkner is never quite this entertaining”, before predicting that within a few years James “will be in the running for the Nobel Prize”. Packed with numerous scenes of explicit and steamy sex, The Disappearers moves back and forth through time using the device of diaries, interviews and newspaper cuttings to tell the story of eight young gay men who were massacred whilst staging John Herbert’s La Fortuna and the Eyes of Men.

The scenes of the attack are chillingly violent, which James recounts from the attackers’ perspective: after a moment of disorientation, it becomes clear that he has no intention of justifying them, but rather of understanding what triggers such bestial ferocity and whether there is anything intrinsically linked to the culture of his country, which suffers from persistent, deep-seated homophobia. This memorable 640-page novel blends highbrow and lowbrow with prodigious skill: James manages to fuse literary language with Jamaican patois, just as he did in what has so far been his most celebrated book, A Brief History of Seven Killings, winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2015. The enthusiasm of the New York Times critic is not an isolated case: Kati Waldman heaped praise on it in The New Yorker, Yagnishsing Dawoor called it “a triumph” in The Guardian, and Hamilton Cain described it as “heart-wrenching, hilarious, magnificent” in The Boston Globe.

Born in Kingston to two police officers, the writer has experienced bullying and homophobia first-hand, and has stated: “I knew I would have to leave Jamaica either on a plane or in a coffin”. He now lives between Minneapolis and Brooklyn with his partner Nicholas Boggs, himself the author of an acclaimed biography of James Baldwin, a writer whom James regards as an essential point of reference. A film enthusiast, he is one of the few who does not consider cinema to be a form of expression inferior to literature. He has stated that the film that best represents his life is Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, and has alternated between writing screenplays and the novels Black Leopard, Red Wolf and Moon Witch, Spider King: it was recently announced that the first volumes of this African fantasy trilogy have been optioned by Ryan Coogler, the director of Sinners. In what has now become a cultural phenomenon, as well as a bestseller, the music of those years features repeatedly, particularly Nirvana and Duran Duran: sometimes James shares his enthusiasm, as with Bruce Springsteen and Sinead O’Connor, whilst at other times he references songs as a backdrop to the action, creating the effect of a soundtrack: it is no surprise that, due to certain dramatic choices and the brutal yet light-hearted way in which he depicts violence, James has been compared to Quentin Tarantino. There are many themes explored in The Disappearers, from colonialism to the relationship between parents and children, and there is no shortage of sharp judgements – Trollope is preferred to Dickens – whilst the literary references blend the highbrow and the lowbrow: Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie, but also Bob Marley, The Cosby Show and the Hellboy comics. The novel’s strength lies in its musicality, even in the passages describing the loneliness of those who have died of AIDS, about which Dwight Garner wrote, ‘I’m still trying to recover from the knives he plunged into my heart’.

This is not the only heart-wrenching moment: there is a scene in which a boy sarcastically congratulates his deeply homophobic father for being the first person ever to have wished that his son would be raped at secondary school. The father replies, “I should have killed you whilst you were asleep”, and at that moment the reader senses that the anger is on the verge of exploding; yet, unexpectedly, pity and tenderness emerge in the book: “Revenge has never told me what revenge is supposed to be,” writes James, “it just sits there like a bloody word”.