Wow, just wow! Imagine a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino fleshed out with the literary brilliance of William Faulkner and you'll get some idea of Marlon James's astonishing accomplishment with this bombocloth novel. But that's not really fair: most of the voices telling this often confusing and always violent tale--which include a couple of queer ones and quite possibly the flakiest, most unstoppable woman you'll ever meet--speak in Jamaican patois although James is just as fluent in the Queen's English employed by journalists and CIA agents. The attempted assassination in 1976 of Bob Marley--referred to only as "the Singer"--is at the hub of this very circular story which begins in Kingston and ends up in New York City two decades later. Chief among the many characters is a drug kingpin named after a Clint Eastwood movie. Although I'm not entirely sure who comprise the seven killings, Josey Wales is responsible for at least four that occur in a Brooklyn crack house while he shoots from a gun in each hand. Fun fact: according to James, nearly every household in Jamaica in the 70s had a Marty Robbins album. Marty put my hometown on the musical map!
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