Reviews with content warning for Murder - A Brief History of Seven Killings

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A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

25 reviews

spacecars's review

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challenging dark informative sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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mepresley's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.25

An incredibly dark and ambitious book that, despite being cover to cover full of violence, is sometimes lyrically beautiful. I’m always impressed with a book that is able to present an unlikeable protagonist in a way that still keeps the reader invested, and this book has a lot of POV characters, only one of whom I would consider remotely likable, but all of whom I found completely engrossing. Each voice is distinct: from high-ranking gang members (Papa Lo, Josey, Weeper) to expendable gang members (Bam-Bam, Demus), to the CIA (Barry Diflorio, Jamaican station chief), to journalist (Alex Pierce), to bystander in the wrong place at the wrong time (Nina), to hit man (John-John K), to Rikers inmate (Tristan Phillips), to the ghost of a politician (Sir Arthur Jennings). I would have liked to have

more than one female voice, for sure.

Spanning from 1976 to 1991,

the attempted murder of Bob Marley, here called only the Singer, to the death of Josey Wales, the man who pulled the trigger and propelled himself to the position of untouchable don in Copenhagen City, and then managed to fuck it all up so badly that he was burned alive in his prison cell. I have to admit, I cried at the exchange between Josey and Doctor Love, particularly when Doctor Love told Josey he was disobeying orders just this once and gave Josey the pills so he wouldn’t feel what was happening to him. I was also very touched by Weeper’s death, the genuine connection between him and the begrudging assassin John-John, who held Weeper as he died and did Weeper the final kindness of letting Weeper think his boyfriend was alive.

The title works on two levels—first, it traces the deaths of seven of the eight men involved in the assassination attempt on the Singer; second, Alex Pierce’s article on the crack house shooting the is the undoing of Josey Wales focuses on seven of his victims. (However, the title doesn’t make any sense until the end of the novel, really, and there are so many deaths in the book that until you’ve read like 670 pages, it’s natural to feel kind of bewildered which ones are meant to be the “seven killings”)

The novel is divided into 5 parts, in each of which the narrative action takes place over the course of a single day: Dec 2 1976; Dec 3 1976; Feb 15 1979; August 14 1985; and March 22 1991. Ultimately, while this was an interesting choice that mostly works, it comes across to me as style for the sake of style in a way that hinders the story. I was also often frustrated with where & how James broke off the chapters.

For instance, what the hell happened after Nina lit the bedroom on fire after Chuck told her that he was married and not bringing her back to the US?

So much that feels worthwhile falls through the cracks, and sometimes

—especially with the scene where Alex kills Tony Pavarotti—the single-day approach necessitates a lot of exposition in ways that feel forced.

There are places where I was more confused than I really should have been to enjoy the narrative, too.

Why did Mark Lansing bring Alex to the Singer’s house that night and leave him outside? Why didn’t Josey shoot Nina that night, or ever seem to spare a single thought about her, much less try to find her? She saw his face, heard his name. It was hard for me to understand exactly what happened with Papa Lo’s death and I’m not sure why it was presented like a hallucination of the future. How did Barry have no idea what was happening in Miami with Louis Johnson and Doctor Love and yet wrote the book that had William Adler losing his shit? Why did Weeper choose to go out that way? More than that, because I understand nothing about coke or injecting it, until much later —Josey’s conversation with Doctor Love in one of the final chapters, in fact, I didn’t even get whether his OD was accidental or not. Also, was Weeper using crack or did Eubie make that up?

And why did the first four sections of the novel have chapters titled with the character names and the final section have numbered chapters? It really made no sense except

for the moment of reader surprise when you realize Doctor Love is narrating chapter one, and only at the tail end of the chapter when he is face to face with Josey. That’s kind of what I mean by choices that prioritize style at the expense of content.

James is a great writer and I absolutely want to read his other work. There’s well-written dialogue and action, the story is pieced together from these diverse narrators in a way that works (outside of what I already observed), locations are brought to life, and the characters are fantastic. I even feel like I learned a lot about a particular point in Jamaican history. Had I not stopped part of the way through and teased everything out through detailed notes, I probably would have been very lost for a long time, though. The character list was helpful. A map would also have been useful for me.

Two semi-random notes: I didn’t care for the Sir Arthur Jennings chapter on

the Singer’s funeral, which seemed incredibly out of place between the 1985 and 1991 sections of the book, especially because the 1979 section ends with Jennings on the Singer’s death.

And I kind of loved Alex

getting the shit beaten out of him for that stupid article he was writing; he just really seemed to be asking for it the entire novel in one way or another.

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jessies's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny informative sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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maddsienicole's review against another edition

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challenging dark tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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ktrain3900's review against another edition

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challenging dark funny informative reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

You don't read this book so much as you experience it. Within the first hundred pages, I almost put it down and added it to my DNF collection. It's a hard world to enter--poverty, misogyny, foul language, racism, classism, explicit violence, casual death, homophobia so omnipresent you feel like you need a new word for it--and for some, it won't be doable (and that's fair). But if you can do it, you'll be rewarded with a rich, layered, albeit brutal, journey through both time and place. You stay for the characters, none of them shining, all suffering in their way, as they try to survive with whatever generally poor hand of cards they've been dealt. Definitely makes me want to read more by the author - the writing is just so well-done.

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whatthekatdraggedin's review against another edition

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challenging dark sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

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panoptican's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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carlytenille's review

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adventurous challenging informative slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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rhinoceroswoman's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional informative mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Loved this book. It took me a really long time to finish the first time around, so I read it again while listening to an audiobook, and that helped me fill in the parts where I was confused. I really loved that with a few simple google searches, most of the events that they talked about were true, actual events. There was a part in the book where Tristian Phillips tells Alex Pierce that he’s glad that he’s writing his book, and that no Jamaican is could’ve done it.
As a first gen kid of Jamaicans, I’m happy that Marlon James did write this. This is a level of attention to detail and skill that I think could’ve gone on for at least 1,000 pages. This is unlike any other book I’ve read before.

Also, it seems like a bunch of people think that Peter Nasser is Edward Seaga, but while talking to Josey Wales in 1968, he said ‘my party in power’ and the JLP wasn’t in power at the time. This just makes me think that this would mean that Peter Nasser isn’t Seaga? There are also times when they say Seaga by name, so that is kinda confusing.

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chalkletters's review against another edition

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challenging dark tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.0

At some point, I must have read a review of A Brief History of Seven Killingswhich intrigued me enough to buy the book, but I no longer remember it. A brief look online didn’t provide much in the way of clues as to why I thought this would be enjoyable. The historical context of an assassination attempt on Bob Marley was completely unfamiliar, and the phrase ‘crack wars in New York City’ not exactly promising for an entertaining read.

Marlon James’ style feels intentional; each character has a different voice, using 'the Singer’ instead of Bob Marley’s name elevates him to a mythic figure and the stream-of-consciousness changes to reflect the emotional and mental states of his characters. Unfortunately, going in with no prior knowledge of events combined with vast array of narrators and the overload of detail made it difficult to pick out which people and events would prove to be important. The narrative is hard work for an uninformed reader, especially the middle section where the chapters are long enough to feel exhausting.

A Brief History of Seven Killings is also, as is to be expected, incredibly violent. As well as the advertised assassination and drug wars, there’s a lot of background violence, both sexual and otherwise, which certainly didn’t lighten the emotional load any. The Gallows Pole was similarly violent, but A Brief History of Seven Killings had none of that poetic prose to ease the relentlessly miserable experience almost all of the characters were having.

What Marlon James did well was ratchet up the tension, especially just prior to the assassination attempt, but also before other explosive events. Even with no knowledge of what was coming, it was obvious that something was about to go down, which was emotionally engaging.

A reader who picked up A Brief History of Seven Killings because the blurb or real-life history sounded intriguing would probably enjoy it, this book just wasn’t for me, and I blame that more on whatever I read that interested me in it more than I blame it on the book itself.

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