Published by OneWorld, 2014, 688 pages.

“If it no go so, it go near so.”

“[E]ven though the Singer is the center of the story, it really isn’t his story. Like there’s a version of this story that’s not really about him, but about the people around him, the ones who come and go that might actually provide a bigger picture than me asking him why he smokes ganja.”

On 3 December 1976, seven armed men tried to kill reggae singer Bob Marley in his Kingston home, two days before the Smile Jamaica Concert, which Marley hoped would bring Jamaica’s warring factions together. Marley survived, and the gunmen were never found. The assassination attempt was thought to have been instigated by the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). Although he maintained he was neutral, Marley was seen as sympathetic to the People’s National Party (PNP), which was then in power.

Marlon James uses this historical event as a basis for this polyphonic book. It covers the run-up to the assassination attempt and its aftermath, and later picks up the story in the US in the 1980s, mostly in New York, where the Shower Posse (known in the book as Storm Posse), a Jamaican gang involved in drugs, is establishing itself.

Instead of using a linear narrative, James tells the story in the voices of the people directly involved in or affected by the assassination attempt. It is a brilliant tactic. Bob Marley—known here simply as the Singer—barely makes an appearance but you can feel his presence throughout. We hear from gunmen, ghetto boys, gang leaders, a Rolling Stone reporter, the ghost of a dead politician, a young woman who slept with the Singer once, and CIA operatives (the US government did not approve of Prime Minister Michael Manley’s socialist agenda).

The central character—the man who drives a lot of the action, and whose dark presence hangs over the book, a counterpoint to the Singer’s light—is Josey Wales, the second-in-command of Papa-Lo, the don of Kingston’s Copenhagen City ghetto. Josey, brutal, ruthless and unforgiving, is the leader of the gunmen who try to kill the Singer, and the founder of Storm Posse. He is ambitious, insidiously taking over Papa-Lo’s gang. Soon the CIA are talking to him rather than to Papa-Lo.

Because you get inside these people’s heads, you get to know them well (sometimes a little too well). Bam-Bam is a kid who has joined Papa-Lo’s gang and is now hooked on cocaine, a tactic used by Josey and his henchmen to control the boys in the gang. Bam-Bam is one of the gunmen who goes to the Singer’s home. His version of what happens there is in blank verse—the only chapter to use the form. It is almost like the event is too terrible to recount in any other way.

The gang, thinking they have killed the Singer, flee the scene. The younger gunmen are terrified by what they have done. The panic of one of the gang, Demus, is expressed in five and a half pages of non-stop text: “I just want to go somewhere a cave ‘round the beach or some hole…I want just want one more line before me dead just then I reason that they will kill me because they must and I goin’ be one of the man who kill HIM which is like the man who kill Jesus I wish me woman could sing to me”.

Everyone has their voice and everyone has a story to tell, winding, overlapping, connecting with stories of the other narrators. Nina Burgess is a young woman who met the Singer and slept with him a while ago. Now she is worried: thieves have broken into her parents’ home, and she is not sure if they raped her mother. She thinks that if she can see the Singer, she can persuade him to help get her parents out of Jamaica. When she finally manages to walk through the gates of the Singer’s home, it is only because the gunmen are there. Terrified because she has seen too much, she goes on the run, changing names and identities.

And then there is Barry Diflorio, the beleaguered CIA station chief; a Cuban CIA consultant known as Dr. Love (“If Doctor Love is in your town, baby, it’s already too late”); Tristan Phillips, the man who tried to broker peace between the PNP and JLP; Alex Pierce, the Rolling Stone reporter sent to cover the Rolling Stones in Jamaica but is more interested in the Singer; and Sir Arthur George Jennings, the ghost who can only be seen by those about to die, and who pops up now and then to comment on the action like a Greek chorus.

The fourth section, set mostly in New York, “White Lines/Kids in America” is the one I found the least interesting, the one that seems to go on a little too long. But the book soon picks up the pace again, and by the time you get to the last section, “Sound Boy Killing”, James does not bother any more to tell you who is speaking. But by then, you know them all so well that it is easy to figure out who is narrating.

There is plenty of violence here—the killings go beyond the seven in the title, the seven gunmen who attacked the Singer, who are in turn hunted down and killed. This is par for the course for James, who does not stint on brutality in his books. Here, even the sex has an element of violence.

This is a book bursting its seams, and its myriad characters jump off the page. Fortunately, James provides a long list of names at the beginning—you’re going to need it, at least at first.

This is a tour de force, albeit a fairly bloody tour de force. Definitely not for the squeamish, but I was blown away by it.