And you almost have to be glad they got away. If they hadn’t, Marlon James might never have written his grisly and mesmerizing new book. A Brief History of Seven Killings is a glittering slice of Gehenna, something Roberto Bolaño might have written after watching the Jamaican film The Harder They Come with Hieronymus Bosch. A merciless, many-voiced epic, it is less a crime novel than a meditation on violence—on the way it feels to those who live it, and the way it spreads in the world. You won’t find much of the sunny Marley of “One Love” in this story. (Or, for that matter, much Bob Marley—“The Singer,” as James obliquely names him, is essentially a plot device.) Seven Killings is more like “Concrete Jungle”—a spiraling groove of crime and violence that reverberates from 1970s Kingston to 1990s Miami and New York.
