What I Am Reading: "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" by Marlon James

I’d been looking forward to this book ever since I read some article about “2019 fantasy books to look forward to” around New Years. It gave me the opportunity to read about an epic fantasy quest, a guilty pleasure that I seek out on rare occasion, without having to live in the shadow of Tolkien. Marlon James, a Jamaican writer, set his novel in a medieval world based on African mythology and society, with commonplace use of magic and (usually horrific) mythological creatures, fortunately described well enough that I didn’t have to be very familiar with the mythology behind them. The book provided a map, and progressed across it sensibly, hitting most of the ominously-named obstacles as it went. It was also surprisingly urban, with about half of the action taking place in various cities that ramp up in level of geographic and technological marvel.

The story is about a tracker named Tracker, with a supernaturally sensitive sense of smell, joining a band hired to track down a kidnapped boy. The boy is in the hands of a group of monsters, roving and killing their way across the landscape through a series of looping, one-way portals. The reason for the boy’s importance (and incidental to his status as a monster kidnappee) is that he is the heir to the suppressed semi-matrilineal line of the North Kingdom’s monarchy, and some seek his restoration in order to return the balance of nature.

The story thus feints toward a political tale, and even has a paper chase through government documents arranged by assassinated reformist elder Basu Fumanguru, formerly the boy’s guardian (which, as a government research analyst, I enjoyed). However, it ultimately reveals itself as a revenge tale. The revenge is not necessary until the final act, taking place after a time jump. However, all of the characters are constantly at each others’ throats, and there is enough bad blood between them to make bloody vengeance an inevitable outcome. The characters, especially the antihero Tracker, find and lose idealism along the way. Despite a background as a loner and an outcast, Tracker weaves a complicated and shifting network of favor with his male lovers, including the eponymous Leopard, a shape-shifter who prefers his animal form. It was a testament to the writing that one of these love interests wasn’t even introduced until halfway through the book, and I still found myself invested in the relationship.

Since Tracker is a tracker, the novel has a recurring olfactory motif, as he identifies people by smell. It also starts out as a sort of oral history, as it is “being told to” a government official from a jail cell; this usually recurs at the beginnings of chapters, but is subsumed into the narrative as the story gets rolling. I  knew that the book was (of course, being a fantasy novel) planned as the first in a trilogy; I was interested to learn via Wikipedia that the other books in the trilogy will tell the same story from different points of view. This made the ending make more sense, as the Tracker asks his jailer what a different character had revealed. Even though that is very English Class, I’m confident that it will turn out to be a good read.