At its best, this novel is like Jamaican Irvine Welsh doing James Ellroy, a history of crime filtered through a collage of dialect-tinged perspectives. And as a history of crime, it's thrilling. The first two (of five) sections are tightly-written, unpredictable, thought-provoking, and any number of other adjectives.
But this novel is betrayed, unfortunately, by its structure, in one of the biggest literary own goals I've seen this century. There's the story of crime, and there's the story of the characters, and after those first two sections, neither one works.
Each of those five sections takes place on a different day, right? And the first two are set on consecutive days, which I think is why they're so much better than the other three, which take place years apart. The first two sections establish and gain momentum throughout. Those latter three sections are predicated almost entirely on globe-spanning coincidences, forsaking that momentum for something more whimsical. Additionally, the first two sections are distinguished by occasional dips into mysticism - and intriguing element that is then almost completely dropped, and which has no bearing on the meaning or narrative impact of the novel.
And as for the character story? Well, divorced from the crime story, we're left with some of the most poorly-written, mind-numbing, retch-inducing scenes of domesticity I've ever read, diving wholeheartedly into cliche and interior plumbing. Know what you get when you spend too much time plumbing the interior? A whole bunch of shit. Characters think themselves into knots, which is surely thrilling for the author but mind-numbing for me. Speaking of thrilling the author, Marlon James should be legally barred from ever writing another romance/sex scene.
In all, a letdown. I'd try James' other works, though. He's a talented writer - and a genuinely funny one too, when he's not neck-deep in his own ass.
