Books not only inspire where we travel: in the best ones, landscape becomes a character all of its own. In our Sense of Place series, authors talk about the importance of location in their work. In Marlon James’ new novel, The Disappearers, the Booker winner lays bare the complexities of his hometown, Kingston, Jamaica
“When you live in a country – and that was Freudian, calling Kingston a country – when you live in a city like Kingston, after a while you realise that there are four, five, six Kingstons,” says Marlon James of his hometown, the setting for The Disappearers, a Booker Prize contender. While his Dark Star fantasy trilogy created a universe from African topography, generally James tends to be moored to Jamaica. In the Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, woven around the assassination of Bob Marley, Kingston took centre stage. In The Book of Night Women, it was the horror world of the 18th-century plantation.
With The Disappearers – an immersive roam around the secret spaces of queer Kingston – Jamaica’s literary powerhouse-slash-therapist puts the city on the couch again, this time for its famous homophobia. No breezy summer read (James is not, as he puts it, “working for the Jamaican tourist board”), the novel is based on a real-life story of the mobbing of a crew of gay men rehearsing a play, one of whom is murdered, and some of whom disappear. Spanning almost two decades starting in 1988, it is told through multiple points of view, interspersed with shards of interviews, circuitous diary episodes and letters. It is a detective story, an investigation of the aftermath of violence and a reckoning with hatred.
The writing of the book seems compelled by loss – though James describes it as “fomo”. He was there, yet not there, in Kingston during the period in which the book is set. While he was “going to church to pray the gay away”, other people his age were immersed in the richness and jeopardy of Kingston’s queer life. The Disappearers is, in part, an attempt to recover ghost relationships, rivalries and friendships. “I wanted to find the life in Jamaica I didn’t experience. It’s not just the drama and tragedy I missed out on, but also the survival, the fun, the humour. I missed out on the community.”
James built this Kingston by interviewing people. “I always feel like I’m not so much of a novelist but a journalist for imagined people,” he says. “This could have been nonfiction. You have to be fair, even with the horrible people.” He spoke to about a dozen people, “and I ended up with a portrait of Jamaica more complicated and more fascinating than I expected. There was a time when Kingston had four or five operating gay bars. And there was a time when attitudes weren’t as severe as they then became. The idea of Jamaica as a roaming band of homophobes waiting to lynch somebody is not true, I learnt. I wanted to show how these people lived their lives, how they found companionship, how they found joy, what they did when hit with drama.”