Marlon James’s The Disappearers brings Jamaican homophobia into Booker spotlight
Marlon James’s new novel, longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, follows a group of queer men in Aids-era Kingston and places state, social and religious hostility at the center of a brutal, sweeping story. Reviewers have praised its scale and moral force, while noting that its length and fragmented structure can make it demanding reading.
Marlon James’s latest novel has arrived as a large, ambitious and deliberately difficult work of fiction: a 640-page Booker longlisted epic set in Aids-era Kingston that examines the costs of homophobia in Jamaica. Published by Hamish Hamilton, The Disappearers spans neighborhoods, decades and continents, and uses that reach to track a world in which queer life is shadowed by danger, erasure and violence.
A sprawling Kingston novel
James has spoken in the past about the value of “sweep” in literature, meaning not only physical journeys but emotional and historical movement as well. The Disappearers takes that idea seriously. Its story roams through “uptown, downtown, ghetto and gully” in Kingston, detours to 1950s England, and eventually jumps forward to the United States in the 2000s. The scale is part of the point: the novel tries to show how one attack, one community and one culture of prejudice can echo across time and place.