My Sister the Serial Killer, Autumn Light, Black Leopard Red Wolf, Half Gods

In the words of the White Rabbit, I'm late!

Though technically, if you see this as an April newsletter and ignore the minor detail that I pretty much blipped out in March, then I'm not really late. One reason for this is that I've been taking tentative steps towards writing Book Two and because I started reading Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James. In the time that it has taken me to drag myself through Black Leopard, Red Wolf, I have managed to finish reading three books and abandon one. Having finally finished it, I feel like I know how a cat feels when someone deliberately strokes their fur the wrong way to make it stand on end. More on that later. Let me tell you about the books that I did enjoy.

First up, the delightful My Sister the Serial Killer Oyinkan Braithwaite. There are very few books that get high praise from reviewers and still don't feel like a letdown when you finally get round to reading them. (Normal People by Sally Rooney is one that I think I expected too much of because of gushing reviews. It starts off brilliantly but I was left vaguely dissatisfied by the end.) Braithwaite's novel, on the other hand, doesn't disappoint.

Korede and Ayoola are sisters, even though no one would mistake them as related. Ayoola is beautiful, charming and a serial killer. This is not a spoiler. The title sort of gave that detail away. Korede, in contrast, is the prickly one. They're bound together by love and a secret, which emerges in bits and parts as Korede cleans up after Ayoola (literally). When Ayoola starts flirting with the man on whom Korede has been crushing, things start getting complicated. Because Ayoola's track record suggests her boyfriends end up as dead bodies that are dumped off a bridge in Lagos, in odd hours of the night. The real question of the book is not whether Ayoola will be caught, but how far one will go to support their sister?

What I loved most about Braithwaite's writing is the way she weaves in the cadences of Nigerian speech into her English. It gives the storytelling a different rhythm altogether. She also chose to write the book in first person, as Korede. Rarely do we see serial killing from the perspective of the sidekick who also happens to be wonderfully droll, but in thrillers, the first-person perspective can be tricky because it limits the information that the reader has access (everything has to be from that one perspective). No one else gets to inform the narrative. In Braithwaite's hands, however, the first-person narrator is a winner.
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On to the next one: Autumn Light, by Pico Iyer. Can I take a moment to humblebrag and say that I have legit grounds to call the author by first name since a) we have spent an hour chatting, and b) he wrote me the nicest email ever after reading my article on him? If only referring to him by his first name didn't feel so much like name-dropping.

Anyway, Iyer has a new book, titled Autumn Light. It's a slow, languorous passage through one season and the everyday conflicts of ageing. Set in a small town in Japan, Iyer weaves stories of his father-in-law, his estranged brother-in-law, his daughter, and Japan's cultural history to create a tapestry of the country's society in the present. Adding perspective are a collection of elderly ping pong players in whose midst Iyer describes himself as a proto-Bieber.

Autumn Light is one of those books that really deserves the "creative non-fiction" tag. It has the elegant language that Iyer is well-known for, but more importantly, the book presents a very, very careful selection of facts and incidents, arranged very, very particularly. It reads like a novel, but charming as it is, this is not a book for anyone in the mood for events, plot and drama.

Last up: Half Gods, by Akil Kumaraswamy. The title refers to the Pandavas, heroes of the Mahabharata, sons born of godly fathers and men who spend the better part of their lives in exile. Despite being beloved princes, they belong nowhere. Similarly, the family that Kumaraswamy writes about exists in a state of unbelonging, awkward in America and far away from Sri Lanka.

There's little divine in the little world of this volume of 10 interlinked short stories. Barring the names from the Mahabharata, these keenly-observed accounts of loss and grief feel viscerally human. There's no pop of exotica or melodrama here (despite the blindingly-bright colours of the cover). Kumaraswamy manages to downplay the drama of even a love triangle between two brothers and one wife. But using a palette made up of bleakness, exhaustion, confusion, grief and determination, Kumaraswamy pieces together a kaleidoscopic view of South Asian diaspora in America.

This might be Kumaraswamy's debut, but her writing is mature and masterful. It's quite interesting to see how she writes the Sri Lankan civil war into the stories. Sometimes, it's an invisible character that sometimes comes to the forefront and at other times, lurks in the background. If you don't know the history, you might want to read up a little because Kumaraswamy isn't interested in giving you background that is one Google search away.

Half Gods isn't a book that you read compulsively. It's too sad for binge-reading. But if you pace yourself, this is an enriching if emotionally-draining volume. *

And finally, Black Leopard, Red Wolf. The novel is the first part of a fantasy trilogy by Marlon James, who first made headlines for his Booker prize-winner, A Brief History of Seven Killings. The only word I have for A Brief History… is dense. It’s an incredible book because of how much it packs in between its covers. From issues to characters, it’s teeming and noisy. The language is rich and peppered with unfamiliar words and phrases unless you’re from Jamaica. Basically, James doesn’t cut the reader any slack, but settle into the book, and you realise it really is genius. I hadn't read James or heard of him before he won the Booker, but having read A Brief History ..., I was excited about this new one. Plus, it has a gorgeous cover.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf is set in a fantastical Africa, filled with witches, shape-shifters, miracles and nightmares. Our storyteller is the Red Wolf of the title, known by the name Tracker because he has a nose. (He frequently forgets to use it though, but that’s a separate problem.) Tracker also has some serious mummy and daddy issues, thanks to a sordid family history, and trust is not something that comes naturally to him – which should make him an excellent candidate for the task of finding a missing boy. Accompanying him is a motley crew that includes a leopard that can change into a man, a depressed giant (whom you shouldn’t call a giant. It upsets him), a very smart buffalo, a sexy ex-prefect, and a witch. We’re told very early on that the boy is dead, but the story of what happens when Tracker looks for him through many magical kingdoms is essentially the tale of Black Leopard, Red Wolf. There's a lot here that should make the reader's stomach churn and James makes it a point to include characters who question most of the problematic elements he includes in the book – sometimes Tracker raises the questions, like when female circumcision appears in the novel; sometimes the questions are directed to him (he may be the hero, but he is far from heroic). It’s a careful and conscious balancing act.

A lot of the creatures and characters that Tracker encounters in his adventures are from different African mythologies, as is the style of storytelling which is a clever ode to oral cultures. The narrative seems to move in circles rather than a straight line, seemingly repetitive and yet moving forward. Lies are told, caught out and when the tale is retold, you as the reader have to wonder how much of it is true now and whether you can really tell what isn’t true. Trust the tale, not the teller, they say, but what happens when both are deceptive? The language James uses often dismisses conventional English grammar and uses words from other languages, dismembering this received language and reconstituting it to make it more responsive of older, more natural rhythms of speech.

Which would all be fantastic, but for three tiny issues. The first is a deeply subjective feeling more than a criticism, so I’m just going to get it out of my system quickly. Black Leopard, Red Wolf felt laboured to me. It’s as though James realised it would be a great idea to write a mashup of Black Panther (yes, the Marvel superhero film) and Game of Thrones (yes, that money-spinner by GRR Martin that is so overwhelmingly white that I think you become a few shades fairer just by watching it), and then plodded on manfully even when it wasn't coming together. Especially as the novel goes on, it feels as though James is desperate to ‘top’ what he’s already done in terms of shock value, weirdness and violence. Not because the story demands it.

Then there's the fact that not only does Tracker hate women, the novel is filled with messed-up women who all use their power to dominate and exploit men. Sure, the men aren't exactly cherubs of cute goodness, but they have their redeeming qualities. They love, they care, they feel human. In sharp contrast, the women in the book are all unnatural in one way or another. Most are witches. A few are demonic. The only close-to-good female character dies within a few beats of us meeting her. A girl gets to be part of the good guys when she's possessed by a male spirit. As tiresome as the sexism gets, it's worth keeping in mind that this is just the first part of the trilogy and the whole thing is being told from Tracker's decidedly warped point of view. All this could turn on its head in the coming books.

For me, the real problem with Black Leopard, Red Wolf is that it’s a fantasy Africa that unwittingly ends up giving weight to the old, racist spiel about it being the ‘dark’ continent. This is definitely not James's intention, but the Africa of Black Leopard, Red Wolf is sex-drenched, animalistic, full of savagery, cruelty and strangeness. There’s little kindness to be found here, even while horrors crawl out of every crack in the earth. Children are enslaved, humans are sacrificed to appease powerful beings, parents abandon children, women are abused, people are tortured, boys are demonic, girls are vicious, demons walk among men – in a weird way, this Africa is full of the barbaric behaviour that racist colonisers spun tales of as 'evidence' that its people need ‘civilizing’.

Especially since James has said in interviews that dropping Black Panther into conversations helped warm his publisher to Black Leopard, Red Wolf, I want to point out the contrast between the two in terms of the fictional African nations they create. In Black Panther, we’re introduced to Wakanda, an African country that has not seen colonisation, where black culture has flourished and flowered. It has an army of women warriors. The technology that it treats as normal is like magic to the advanced peeps of the CIA. This is not to suggest it has no exotica – it’s still a monarchy; the Wakandans hold on to traditions like hand-to-hand combat to decide who will be king – but the underlying point of Wakanda is to emphasise that it is a progressive, advanced society. In contrast, the one thing Black Leopard, Red Wolf emphasises is savagery. Every kingdom and terrain Tracker and his companions travel through is marked with violence. Dead bodies drop like rain. Blood spatter is everywhere, fights erupt over nothing, people violate others just for the heck of it. Murder pops up so often that approximately 100 pages into the book, whenever a new character emerged, I just assumed a gory death was incoming. And more often than not, I was right.

I know that with the descriptions of the kingdoms – particularly their fascinatingly different styles of architecture – James is making the point that the world of oral cultures is not primitive, but with the violence that is inflicted by and upon his characters again and again and again, the impression that Black Leopard, Red Wolf creates is of a brutal, bloody Africa where humanity is just scar tissue, if it survives at all. The worst is probably Dolingo, the queendom where everyone lives on trees. It's like an upside-down version of Galadriel and her Lothlorien, as shown in the film version of The Lord of the Rings. Because Dolingo's 'magic' is that it is powered by child slaves and the queen is a spoilt megalomaniac. Plus, Tracker is horribly tortured here. (Yes, not only is the worst of the places run by a terrible queen, the men are all emasculated. Freud is probably whirlwinding in his grave just at the thought of it.)

This is not to suggest that the novel is not accomplished. James is brilliant at crafting voices for his characters, structuring this looping narrative and using language in a way that is richly imaginative. But the idea of fiction that depicts Africa as a land of darkness, magic and horror; and black people as weird, violent crazies – I disliked it intensely. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I’m from a country that is racist despite not being white. The stereotypes are not things of the past, but contemporary realities that can make India a very place to negotiate if you're black.

Bottom line: the chances of me picking up the next books in this trilogy are about as high as James writing a romantic comedy.
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And with that, it's over and out from me. Thank you for reading. Dear Reader will be back soon.