Photograph by Victoria Campbell
Marlon James in Minneapolis
Marlon James is nursing a hot cup of tea, explaining how the 315-year-old African witch in his new novel perceives the flatness of time, when his iPhone hums. He has to take this call—now.
James, 48, has recently returned home to his condo in Minneapolis from his second flat, in Brooklyn, and he’ll be flying out the next afternoon for an event in Los Angeles. This will be the big launch party, sponsored by Entertainment Weekly, for his new book, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, at the buzzy Line Hotel. This cocktail social marks the start of a media campaign that could vault James over a wall and into the realm of bestselling fantasy novelists: George R.R. Martin territory.
And James has left his Órttu dress—his party outfit—back in New York. Whether by courier or magic, it has got to find its way across the continent in the next 24 hours. (“Because I’m petty like that,” James explains.)
“Yeah, the black one that almost feels like a T-shirt material,” he says to his friend or his assistant (or his friendly assistant). “The super-long one with the cell phone pocket on the right or on the left.”
James presses a button. “Now what was I saying?”
He was saying, in short, that his new novel introduces a pantheon of queer shapeshifters and multi-hued witches, and monsters—a narrative DNA taken from “a hallucinatory Africa,” as Neil Gaiman puts it on a book jacket blurb. The point, James explains, is to displace the Eurocentric mythology that underpins the fantasy worlds of writers like Martin, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and J.K. Rowling.
It’s a daunting, world-building proposition. Even as Black Leopard, Red Wolf—all 620 pages of it—drops in stores this month, James has signed on to finish two more installments: part two in 2021, and the final book in 2023. “I gotta deliver,” James says.
I think here, again, of Martin and his Game of Thrones—whose sixth installment in A Song of Ice and Fire has been moldering on its author’s computer for nearly eight years.
“George R.R. Martin did cross my mind,” he says. “Because I like that he was writing a fantasy world that was still very adult.” But James wanted to help fantasy readers (“They’re not all horny white men,” he deadpans) imagine someplace completely new. “I don’t mind it being a kind of reset,” he says.
That’s not to say that he avoided ogres and queens and chosen ones—far from it. “I love fantasy tropes,” James says, “and they’re all there—there’s a joker and there’s a thief.”
But reading his saga, it’s obvious that James treats these tropes with something less than reverence. In other words, James wanted to troll that fantasy world more than reanimate that world’s trolls.
Photograph by Victoria Campbell
Marlon James in Minneapolis
•••••
Eleven years after he moved to Minnesota to teach creative writing at Macalester, Marlon James may already be the most prominent writer in Minneapolis. When we meet in December, at Wilde Café, across the river from downtown, his giddyap reveals a hitch from a recent meniscus surgery. He wears a dark-blue wool sweater, with his long dreadlocks tied behind his shoulders. James may be recognizable—but his celebrity still feels frictionless.
Our waiter, for example, doesn’t freak out when he drops off James’s Earl Grey with soy and sugar. But later on, that same waiter takes me aside to mention how much he loved James’s last book, A Brief History of Seven Killings, and how he recognized him because James composed a portion of that masterpiece right here, in this very booth.
Black Leopard, Red Wolf represents James’s first book since he won the ultra-prestigious Man Booker prize in 2015 for Seven Killings. This was a juicy historical novel exploring the 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley—referred to only as “the Singer”—in James’s hometown of Kingston, Jamaica. James, an academic raised by two parents who worked in law enforcement, somehow managed to channel the voices of Kingston’s meanest streets, and in cinematic fashion. On a more literary level, James explored the psychology of a society that expressed its post-colonial shame through displays of violence.
“I wasn’t trying to write a parallel with today,” James says. “I was trying to come to terms with the past.”
That challenging novel became a phenomenon: The Booker prize brings with it £50,000 and major lit fame. “The Booker can completely change your life if you want it to,” James says. “And I kind of wanted it to.”
Seven Killings was ultimately translated into more than 20 languages in 26 countries, and James made reading appearances in many of them. He got an apartment in Brooklyn, where he spends the better part of winter and spring, and began dabbling in Hollywood. HBO optioned Seven Killings for a series and James wrote a pilot before the project wound up in development hell.
James hasn’t shied away from the explosion of attention. “I certainly caused a lot more controversy,” he says. “Just with my Facebook posts alone.” James has often caused a stir: complaining about the airports in India; roasting self-immolating liberals for broadcasting their “woke credentials”; et cetera.
If this sounds distracting, James explains, “In terms of how my new reality was affecting my new book, I had to shut it all out.”
Photograph by Caitlin Abrams
Black Leopard Red Wolf, by Marlon James
“Jamaica was a British colony, and a British colony spends a lot of time erasing African spirituality. How you going to justify slavery if you don’t erase that?”
James had made a close-up study of this dynamic during his pre-novelist gig as an art director for the Jamaican superstar dancehall rapper Sean Paul. (James, working in Kingston, organized Sean Paul’s frequent magazine and video shoots.) “As soon as he got a hit, everybody got weird,” James says. “What saved Sean was he never lost the friends who kept him grounded. You have to—if you lose those you’re going to drift.”
Back in 2015, James wrote an essay in The New York Times about how Minnesota provided the place where he could live as himself as a writer, as a professor, and as a finally-OK-with-himself gay man. “I’ve now written two very big books here,” he pauses a beat before laughing. “In terms of size, of course.”
He appreciates the “physical, emotional, artistic” space he finds in the Cities. “It’s easy for me to establish normalcy here,” he says. “And I need that to write.” He teaches creative writing at Macalester each fall semester. He goes to the Parkway with friends to see Young Frankenstein.
He rents a writing office above a seafood joint in south Minneapolis. And he wrote almost all of Black Leopard within what he once called “the bunker.”
“I work in a space that I share with a bunch of people that couldn’t care less—Oh yeah, you’re that dude that plays Stereolab in your office.”
•••••
There’s another reason James stopped trawling coffee shops and wrote his new book in a single spot. For all its market potential, the new series also carries the weight of restoring a lost cultural history—and James means that literally.
“With this book, I realized I can’t be lugging 20 research books around and throwing them on the table and trying to write,” he says.
When he embarked on Black Leopard, he started amassing a personal reference library on African folklore. Some of these came straight from the source, like his book of sub-Saharan proverbs; others passed through his Caribbean neighbors via slave ship, like books on African Orishas in Brazil or Cuban Santeria.
“I knew I wanted to tell an African story,” he says. “But I didn’t know what that meant.” Other than Anansi the Spider—a trickster figure that originated in Ghanaian tribal culture, before making the trip to Jamaica—James didn’t grow up around much African mythology at all.
“Jamaica was a British colony, and a British colony spends a lot of time erasing or suppressing African spirituality,” he says. “How you going to justify slavery if you don’t erase that?”
Photograph by Victoria Campbell
Marlon James in Minneapolis
So he grew up watching matinee shlock like Dragonslayer and Willow, and reading the Star Wars books, like every other ’80s-era kid in the Western hemisphere. “I didn’t read Lord of the Rings until college though,” he laughs. “Lord of the Rings was what the rich kids read.”
The basic plot of Black Leopard should be recognizable to anyone familiar with any mythology, East or West, North or South. An unlikely band of misfits, led by a character known only as “The Tracker,” embarks on a quest for a MacGuffin. But the musicality of his characters’ voices, and the frankness with which James treats their homoerotic desires, differentiate this book as a Marlon James joint.
“My obsession with holes!” he howls. He collects himself. “I think I’m interested in scatology.”
Only a professor could spit out that sentence, I say. And James chuckles: “I like writing about human behavior that we don’t like to talk about. I’m here to uncover shit.”
James knows that his favorite territory makes network executives nervous about a screen adaptation. “I get initial interest, but then they look and go, Oh it’s dark, or it’s queer, or it’s in language that’s not straight English.” But then fiction isn’t doing its job unless it makes you nervous, he says.
The voice in the book initially made James uncomfortable, too. He started writing Black Leopard in the third person, but quickly realized it was the wrong move. The tone felt put on: “The maiden was betwixt the trees and the meadow,” he sighs. “It just wasn’t happening.”
It was only when he abandoned the high castle and started telling the story from the perspective of The Tracker—“the vagrant in the street”—that the voice started to pour out of him.
I tell him The Tracker’s voice—sarcastic, darkly funny—reminds me of James’s Facebook updates, and he busts out again.
“I rarely try to make my characters like me,” he says. “That doesn’t mean I succeed, but I really did want him to be a snarky son of a bitch.”
James explains that in African folklore, the trickster reigns. “The whole idea of truth is a different thing,” he says. “And there’s a different relationship to storytelling. So if I’m telling you something that happened and you know I’m a liar?” He laughs. “Am I telling you the truth this time?”
His phone rings again. James apologizes once more. “Yeah, all right,” he says into the receiver. “It’s for an event Tuesday evening—if we get it on Tuesday night it won’t make much sense. Yes, even the post office can do next-day.”
James seems to have a lock on his missing dress. This new book (and the book after that, and the one after that) will take him from Jamaica, to Minneapolis, to New York, to Los Angeles, to an African spirit world like no one has ever seen. You get the sense that things are about to get very unusual for James, and that he’s going to look fantastic for it.
