AT nearly 600 pages, Marlon James’s new novel, The Disappearers (Riverhead, $27.99), matches the ambition of its project. Comparable in scale to his Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, it is another maximalist novel, crowded with characters and animated by a genuine feat of imaginative astonishment. James’s novels sprawl, but their sprawl is purposeful, their expansiveness grounded in an emotional resonance closely tied to lived experience. The Disappearers casts aside conventional proprieties in favour of plain talk and in-your-face truths, presenting a reality so pungent it feels almost tactile.
James is a fiercely brave writer, akin to Junot Díaz in certain salient respects. In both writers, one rarely senses an author-editor standing over the prose, warning, “I shouldn’t say that,” or “This might be too vulgar, too honest, too whatever.” What we get instead is something closer to an unexpurgated reality, making James’s novels surprising not merely for what they depict but for the dexterity with which they depict it. His storytelling has a rawness, but it is controlled, one that continually tests the limits of what literary fiction can accommodate. The story goes on and on, and the accumulation of words gradually brings a world into being in the fullness of its then and now.
The Disappearers also has a peculiar prescience, an encompassing vision of past and present that feels uncannily alive. The signposts of its period are everywhere: music, television, novels, fashions, philosophies—the cultural signatures that identify a particular time. In his recent novels, James seems to be arguing for an everything-in-it kind of fiction, a novel in which everything really is included because his gaze is so varied and his attention so fine-grained. James does not write slice-of-life novels; he writes whole-life novels.
The Disappearers belongs to a larger undertaking: James’s Dark Star trilogy, planned to comprise three nearly 500-page novels, two of which are complete, telling the same story from different perspectives. A Brief History of Seven Killings, despite its title, is anything but brief, unfolding across years and through multiple points of view. The Disappearers employs a similar technique to achieve a comparable sense of grandeur. Its maximalism takes the form of journals, letters, interviews, gossip, recollections, and other forms of testimony. The result can be uproariously funny and profoundly sad, sometimes within the same stretch of prose. Its pathos is persistent; the reader’s emotions are continually implicated. There is a great deal of suffering here.
James’s most astonishing feats often arise through literary surprise—not the gimmicky surprise of a conventional whodunit but the deeper kind associated with poetry, when meaning suddenly rearranges itself in the mind. In The Disappearers, such moments emerge from colliding perspectives, the exposure of ugly assumptions, and the sudden recognition of how much a seemingly ordinary life can contain.
Set in Jamaica in 1988, the novel centres on a brutal attack: a group of homophobes violently interrupts eight gay men rehearsing a play, leaving several maimed and one dead. In a masterstroke, James enters the attackers’ minds, exposing their repulsive rationalisations. He gives their bigotry an explanation without confusing explanation with justification, revealing a worldview in which violence has become an almost automatic expression of hatred. Their cruelty stands in sharp, tragic contrast to the warmth, humor, and ordinary intimacy of the gay men’s creative collaboration.
James renders the villains’ words in Jamaican patois, whose verbal immediacy situates the speakers firmly within their social and cultural milieu. The passages, from the novel’s second section, Blackjacks, are horrifying not simply because of their explicit calls for murder but because of the casualness with which hatred becomes a moral imperative. James allows us to inhabit the attackers’ rationalisations without granting those rationalisations any moral legitimacy. Their reasoning is disturbing, irrational, and ultimately empty: violence reduced to gay bashing, enmity without meaningful justification. The language itself becomes a weapon, its relentless repetition mimicking the machinery of persecution.
The brutality of the attack is all the more devastating because of what precedes it: the disagreements, humorous banter, vulgarity, profanity, and ordinary intimacy of men working together on a theatrical production. James renders these interactions wonderfully, capturing the recognisable pleasures and frictions of creative collaboration. For the most part, the gatherings are joyous. Then, with startling suddenness and casual brutality, everything is destroyed. One man is killed; others are maimed; all are changed.
The conceit that gives the novel its title operates on several levels. Some characters disappear from the scene; some disappear into the dust. Others disappear into new versions of themselves, shedding their former identities “like a snake,” as one character puts it. They disappear into performative manhood, into obscurity, and into the roles demanded by a world violently antagonistic to their existence. Disappearance becomes not merely an event but a strategy for survival, a means of escaping persecution even as it exacts a terrible psychological cost.
One of the dominant perspectives in the opening chapters belongs to Porteus, a middle-class, mixed-race gay Jamaican man. His journal entries provide an intimate record of Jamaican life in the 1980s, rendered with poignant specificity. Young and privileged in certain respects, Porteus is perhaps naïve, especially in comparison with the older, more experienced men around him. His position establishes a tension between innocence and knowledge, between the world he imagines himself to inhabit and the world he is gradually forced to understand. His journal is both a record of personal discovery and a window onto a society whose violent and irrational antagonism towards gays is epithelial.
Another major perspective belongs to Jordan Brown, one of the novel’s most disturbing characters: a vengeful, volatile survivor of the attack whose story is conveyed through interviews. His sections supply some of the book’s thriller-like momentum, while also complicating any simple distinction between victimhood and the capacity for violence. The mature voice of Havelock Titus, another survivor, offers a more somber and seasoned perspective. A learned man and Oxford alumnus who lived in England for many years, Havelock is compassionate, empathetic, and almost weary of the realities he has endured. His brushes with death lend his character a poignant authenticity. Through him, the novel acquires a historical consciousness that extends beyond the immediate violence of its plot.
The Disappearers is not an easy read. It is a brutal book, full of violence that would be easier to tolerate if it possessed the exaggerated unreality of an action movie, where a hero can kill a hundred men without our registering their suffering. Here, suffering is impossible to dismiss. James brings it close, refusing the reader the comfort of distance. This is violence in close-up, violence that discomforts and disturbs. There is also graphic sex, rendered without much interest in shielding the reader from discomfort.
The novel is challenging not only because of its subject matter but also because of its fragmentary structure. James moves among survivors’ perspectives and shifts continually among forms: interviews, letters, journal entries, recollections, gossip, and other modes of testimony. These shifts can be disorienting, but they are central to the book’s method. Its extravagance is also its aesthetic principle: a refusal to limit itself and a determination to engage with as much of a life, and a historical moment, as possible. No single perspective can contain the whole, and no single narrative form can do justice to the multiplicity of experience. The novel’s structure conforms to this prime directive.
That richness suggests both profundity and the sort of literariness often associated with postmodern fiction. Yet richness has its costs. The accumulation can be difficult to digest; at times, it seems designed to overwhelm. The novel can haunt and even terrorise its reader. James’s book does precisely this: it unsettles you, so that the pleasure of reading comes inseparably bound up with a sense of disturbance. The novel sticks with you, not always comfortably. It belongs in the company of works such as Samuel R. Delany’s The Mad Man, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch: novels that make us think while also disturbing us, whose effects do not end when the reading does.
Ultimately, though, the characters matter most. Jordan Brown, the bold and vengeful survivor, remains consistently compelling. His actions give the novel much of its thriller-like momentum, but Havelock Titus provides its deepest wisdom. A patient dancer and theatre director who has survived some of the world’s worst, Havelock embodies memory, endurance, and the knowledge that comes from living through history rather than encountering it secondhand. Through him, James moves beyond the immediate drama of violence to a broader meditation on what it means to survive, remember, and keep living in the aftermath of catastrophe.
As he did in A Brief History of Seven Killings, James writes about Caribbean history with an uncompromising directness, dispensing with the protective distance of euphemism. With the exception of his debut, John Crow’s Devil, he has largely been a writer of historical fiction, as The Book of Night Women makes especially clear. He is exceptionally good at it. His historical fiction never settles for merely reconstructing the past; it insists on showing how the past remains alive in the present, embedded in the language people speak, the prejudices they inherit, and the violence they come to accept as ordinary.
The Disappearers is a formidable historical novel, but it is also an exhausting and troubling one. It rattles around in the mind long after the last page. It is not the kind of novel that leaves a reader unchanged or indifferent. It disturbs you. It hurts you. It upsets you. And that may be precisely the point. You may not want to read this novel again. But it is a novel difficult to forget.
