A Brief History Of Seven Killings is an astonishing portrait of politics

Jamaican author Marlon James. Photo / AP

Jamaican author Marlon James has mastered a complicated set of plots and characters, writes Alyssa Rosenberg

I don't claim any particular prescience, but during my honeymoon and just before it won the Man Booker Prize last week, I read Marlon James' novel A Brief History Of Seven Killings, his fictional account of the December 3, 1976, attempt on Bob Marley's life.

James' story proceeds from the bottom up rather than the top down; his CIA officers are field agents rather than high-level officials, he's as interested in individual gunmen as in crime lords, and Marley is the Singer, an object of fear and imagination rather than his main character. And although there are any number of excellent reasons to read James' extraordinary book, including his beautiful writing and his mastery of a very complicated set of plots and characters, I also want to encourage you to read A Brief History Of Seven Killings in the wake of its latest honour because it's an astonishing portrait of the politics of everyday life.

In his acknowledgements, James describes it as "a novel that would be driven only by voice". "Only" feels modest, given the sheer variety of voices in the book, the almost mathematical precision with which James has calibrated his characters' speech while rendering them vibrant and alive, and the political role language plays in the book.

Bam-Bam, one of the small-time criminals who participates in the attack on the Singer, notices the way the white men who bring them guns communicate with their Jamaican co-conspirators. "The white man don't understand much of what Weeper saying," Bam-Bam notes. "He just nod and laugh and say I gotcha! then look at Josey Wales to repeat everything slower but he still laugh too loud at what wasn't no joke. This make Josey Wales' face even more cross because everybody know that he proud that he can speak good."

Josey, a sophisticated criminal who may be frustrated that his education doesn't give him the same leverage in different settings, still manages to use his command of language as a tool of control with his fellow countrymen. "Always speak proper English when you want a man know that this argument is over," he reflects after a dispute. That same polished speech helps Nina Burgess surprise a job agency and find an unusually good position in New York after she flees Jamaica to avoid the men she believes are looking for her because she witnessed the attack on the Singer.

And language gives Nina and Josey insight into how whiteness works. "Nobody in the game uses their feet, but it's football," Nina remarks wryly during a period when she's carrying on an affair with an American employee of a bauxite company. "I love how Americans can just claim something to be whatever they feel it is, despite clear evidence it's not. Like a football game with nobody using any feet that takes forever."

White characters, like dilettante film-maker (and son of a CIA honcho) Mark Lansing, are hungry to claim Jamaican culture as their own, dressing in what journalist Alex Pierce describes as "olive green cargo pants rolled up to the calf, black sneakers, and a red, green and gold wife-beater that's already inched up off his belly button. Judging from how the wind keeps blowing it, a rag's hanging out of his back pocket ... a Rasta tam on his head, with blond bangs hanging out."

But James' Jamaican characters have a more ambiguous relationship to the products of American capitalism. Demus, who is arrested while bathing at an outdoor standpipe, falsely accused of rape, and tortured in custody, knows that having money would protect him from the circumstances that made him so vulnerable. But he doesn't know exactly what contours his dreams of safety take.

Just as he is sharply aware of the nuances of their voices, James has the confidence not to deny his characters their humanity by turning them into moral exemplars, nor paper over the infected wounds that score across the country by suggesting that the loveliness of some of its territory makes up for the savage effects of poverty. CIA agent Barry Diflorio, Rolling Stone writer Alex, and peace treaty official Tristan Phillips all read V.S. Naipaul's 1962 book The Middle Passage, his consideration of Trinidad, British Guyana, Surinam, Martinique, and Jamaica, returning to the same ideas about depicting poverty.

"It cannot be photographed because some parts of West Kingston, such as Rema, are in the grip of such bleak and unremitting repulsiveness that the inherent beauty of the photographic process will lie to you about just how ugly it really is," Alex, a visitor to Jamaica who believes he knows the country better than other white people, reflects.

And ugliness isn't just about trash, though James describes mountains of refuse in a way that captures filth and a kind of majesty; and improper sanitation; and patched-together houses that might blow away in a big tropical storm or succumb to the bite of a construction claw. It's the violation of the social compact that deranges the relationship between citizens and the police who are supposed to protect them so that, as Kingston don Papa-Lo puts it, "Soldier don't act like we is crime and them is order, soldier act like we is enemy and this is war."

James' characters can't always see the architects of their claustrophobic circumstances. But their struggles to reach the ocean, or America, or even a moment of oblivion through a hit of cocaine or the flash of a gun reveal how the great and terrible machine of the world functions.

• A Brief History of Seven Killings (One World $39.99) is out now.