A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS - MARLON JAMES

      At 600 pages, it’s hard to call this book brief and there are many, many more than seven killings in it. Actually, at first I was trying to figure out which seven killings the title was referring to, that perhaps there were 7 “more important” deaths, before the last 50 pages or so revealed the meaning of the title. Title aside, this book has been on my radar since it came out in 2014, it won all sorts of awards and was pitched as being about the attempted assassination of Bob Marley, a historical event that I’m interested in. What the media, conveniently, left out is that this book is really about the history of Jamaica in the late 20th century and more specifically, about the ways the CIA fucked with that island and the blow-back all this caused in the US. “Even though the Singer is the center of the story,” the book says at one point (it only refers to Bob Marley as “The Singer,” for whatever reason) “it really isn’t his story.” This book is profoundly CIA pill’d and really, in an almost non-fictional way, describes the ways that the island was Strategy of Tension’d around the Manley/Seaga elections. The book takes a trick from As I Lay Dying and switches narrators every chapter, often giving us multiple views on the same events and characters whose lives intersect, sometimes without their knowledge, across decades. There are multiple criminals, CIA agents, journalists, regular civilians all of whom are trying to figure out what’s going on in Jamaica and trying to alter it. For personal reasons I was most interested in the CIA stuff. James is particularly wise in showing how the agency is not a monolith, there are some hyper-educated, elite Yale-types who see what they do as profoundly sophisticated and noble and a group of violent thugs who are all too happy to sow discord and kill commies. The tension and collaboration between these two groups is a constant theme if you study the CIA, and is very well rendered in this book. After the stuff directly dealing with the shooting of Marley, the book really expands out and gets wild. The book follows the characters as their gangs go trans-national and become instrumental in the cocaine and crack booms in the USA. The story I’m most familiar with regarding crack centers around the Contras and LA, this book traces the East Coast version of this story, and centers around a lightly fictionalized version of the Shower Posse (here called the Storm Posse) and their rise in role in the drug trade. We get cameos from Griselda Blanco, talk of the School of the Americas and illusions to real life events, like drug-gang leaders with ties to the government mysteriously burning to death in prison. James said he did enough research for this book to fill another book with all the stuff he learned and I do hope he eventually writes that book. I was aware of America’s on-going involvement in both the drug trade, generally, and Jamaica, specifically, but this book really does a great job making it readable and literary. For 600 pages, I captivated and engaged. For it’s blend of real-life geopolitics and literary merit, and, frankly, violence, I can favorably compare it 2666, one of my favorite novels of all time. I know they’re supposedly making a TV show from this book, though I doubt very much that they’ll allow this level of CIA realism on TV, so, in the meantime, if you have any interest at all in 20th century history, Jamaican music/culture and/or want to read a great recent novel, fuck with this. 1976 government-backed gangs.