Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf Is an African Fantasy Epic for the Ages

Above all else, the Man Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James wants you to smell his new fantasy epic, Black Leopard, Red Wolf. To inhale its world. To hear the volume with which characters speak. To see its mystical, ancient African landscapes in three dimensions rather than two. “The biggest compliment someone gave me when this book came out was, ‘Man, I can smell your book,’” James says. “And he wasn't talking the fresh ink.”

James certainly chose the right protagonist, then. Tracker, the story’s quick-tongued young narrator, has a superhuman nose. He can follow someone’s scent to the other side of the world, and even to the underworld—or so he says. The book, which James has jokingly dubbed the “African Game of Thrones,” was written in the tradition of ancient epics. It’s a labyrinth of stories, some true, others created, and it’s up to you to decide which is which. “I wrote it thinking I was going to have listeners, not readers,” James says, citing Africa’s oral tradition. “So it had to be something that has volume. I don't think other novelists think about volume, but I do.”

The attention to volume—and, moreover, to that full, sensory experience—tracks. The book is a visceral odyssey through a world that’s unfamiliar—Frodo’s Shire this is certainly not—but fully realized. We follow Tracker on a search for a mysterious missing child. His journey is packed with carnal sex, cinematic combat, otherworldly creatures, and, most importantly, details—maps of created cities, distinct tribal mores, human idiosyncrasies. The specificity with which Black Leopard’s universe is realized was the product of three years James spent researching the customs, myths, history, and syntax of ancient Africa, not to mention his lifelong affinity for the fantasy genre. And the result is the rare novel that arrives practically destined to be a cultural touchstone for years to come. (Just last week, the movie rights were snagged by Michael B. Jordan’s company.) So you'd better get used to the foul stench of death, witches, a shape-shifting leopard, and lust.

GQ: A lot of this book is pretty psychedelic. Did you have any psychedelic experiences that informed that?
Marlon James: No, I'm a total wuss. Plus I'm a complete lightweight. I'm Jamaican and pot makes me paranoid. I'm a disappointment to my country. [Laughs.] I just think I have an overactive imagination that has never stopped being overactive. Certainly for me as a writer, it was very important that I never grew up. Which is probably why a lot of the things that I read at 16, I still read at 48. I still read tons of comics and sci-fi. I never believed in this idea of certain things that you outgrew. That always struck me as this very humorless, WASPy attitude to literature.

The main character, Tracker, also doesn't want to grow up. He's a bit of a smart-aleck. How did you craft him?
He evolved. I knew he was a smart ass. And one of the reasons I wanted him to be a smart ass was I wasn't interested in noble savages. I wasn't interested in the mission-driven, humorless character. I also wanted a character who looked like he was having fun. He's a wise ass and sometimes he's also kind of an asshole. But more than anything, I wanted him to be real. I didn't want him to be a combination of archetypes. I wanted him to feel like a real character—characters that curse and like certain things and don't like certain things and, like a lot of us, are kind of cranky and sarcastic. He isn't going to run head first into something like a noble hero. It's like, "How much you paying me?" And the more real he became, the more fun he was to write.

The book can be very funny. What has informed your own sense of humor?
I'm not sure. It's weird: one of my early jobs was writing comedy monologues for nighttime talk show hosts in Jamaica. I often think the humor is subconscious because I also write really dark, violent, disturbing shit. And I think the humor sort of stands as a contrast. Without it, the book might seem oppressive.

What was writing for nighttime talk shows in Jamaica like?
It was a pain in the ass. The problem with writing comedy is you can write the best jokes in the world and if the host can't deliver them, they fall flat. And I realized that's what writing jokes in a comedy room is like. You write jokes that leave the room in stitches and the person delivers the monologue and nobody laughs. So you had to get to the point where you stopped writing a joke merely because it's funny and you write something that the host could deliver. Of course, I never got to that point; I just quit.

I love the way that you write sex scenes. Are there certain authors who write sex scenes you especially like to read?
The Latino authors and the gay authors. Everybody else pretty much sucks. I was talking recently about how horrible literary fiction authors write sex. Particularly sex between working class people. These guys don't know a lot of working class people and they don't know how working class people have sex, so of course they can't write it. It's really clinical and antiseptic and it's coldly compulsive, and the people aren't cute. They're just grunting and nobody is listening to any music. And they enjoy the cigarette way more than the sex. There's something very classist about it. As if [the] only people who [enjoy sex are the ones who] have leisure time to go to a nice little dinner or meet in a club where they're all fantastically well dressed, then come back to impossibly posh apartment and have sex to whatever techno music. It's bullshit because it makes it seem like a bricklayer cannot fuck. There are lots of people who work quite a bit for a living who are quite getting their rocks off and have no complaints.

I think sex should be sexy, or at the very least sexual. And I'll bet a lot of the people who win the Bad Sex in Fiction award every year actually thought they were writing good sex.

If you want to read good, filthy sex, you have to read something like Dirty Havana Trilogy. A friend of mine was so enraptured by the sex in that book she made a pilgrimage to Cuba to meet the author. He's just some old dude in Havana. It was very disappointing for her.

What makes Dirty Havana Trilogy’s sex scenes so good?
It's very simple, very unadorned. It's not overwriting it, it's not overheated. I think a lot of literary fiction authors are afraid of being overheated. But [Dirty Havana] is very explicit in what is happening, when it's happening, and how it's happening. And I think that's all you need to write a good sex scene. A good sex scene doesn't need a metaphor. It's like describing a sunset. I always tell my students [at Macalester College], "A sunset doesn't need your help. The sunset will do the work." The sex will do the work.

Michael B. Jordan's company just bought the movie rights to the book. At any point when you were writing Black Leopard did you have a conception of what a film version of it would look like?
Yeah, of course I did. But I didn't take it seriously. Because I think if you take it seriously, you end up in one of those books which you can tell is addressed for a movie. There's some books where it's like, "Why did you even bother? You should've just written a screenplay and a treatment and sent it off.” So I wasn't interested in that at all. I hate when books do that.

At the same time, cinema is almost a bigger influence on me than books. I'm an '80s kid. I grew up with cable. I grew up watching Terminator on VHS. My cinema language is almost all VHS tapes. The whole idea of "A sunset doesn't need your help" is something I got from movies. Because the great thing about movies is they can just be in a scene. They don't have to dress it up. If you're going to make a film, you have to find the meaning and the poetry in the actual thing you're looking at. They don't get to do an allusion like writers do when they think they're being clever. Cinema taught me economy and observation. Cinema also taught me how to do degrees of distance. Do we swoop in when the person says something and it actually hurts the person but the person doesn't want you to know they're being hurt? Or do we pull back and show how the moment was awkward?

Is there a certain actor you'd imagine playing Tracker?
It's going to be interesting, because the person is a wise ass, but the person's also a serious pansexual dude who will pretty much bang everything that moves. In the book, he goes from sleeping with a 100s-year-old woman to a man. So it has to be somebody who we can believe will be that fluid. Maybe Will Smith's kid. [Laughs.]

Your books are thick, narratively daring, and well-crafted. At this point in your career, are there things other writers do that you're in awe of?
Yeah, I'm still in awe of how a guy like Victor LaValle can be so experimental but clearly somebody who you know reads things like comics. And I still am amazed, like a lot of people who write long books, by people who can write short books. I just read Leïla Slimani's The Perfect Nanny, and if I wrote that it would've been a 900-page novel. And part of it is, she has no time for sentimentality whatsoever. It's fantastic. I'm blown away by people who can pull off that kind of economy.

I saw that you did an interview with LaValle in which you were wearing a black-and-white Y3 jumpsuit. And I wanted to ask if there are certain clothes you like to write in. Do you go for comfort or confidence?
I'm way too much of a fashion victim to care about comfort. I'm not a small guy, so it's always surprised me that the Japanese designers work so well. Of course I love Yamamoto a lot. And I wear tons of Y3 stuff. Y3 in particular, but Adidas in general. I write in an office and I go to work, and I'm not going to go to work looking like a slob.

What informed your style?
I've always liked Miles Davis's style. My all time style hero was probably Paul Simonon from The Clash. In fact, all the members of The Clash were pretty sharp. The reason I still wear combat boots is because of The Clash. And I wear combat boots even with a suit. I wear combat boots and a tux.

You mentioned teaching earlier. How have your students influenced you?
My students inspire me all the time. Because they're undergrad, they're not set in their ways yet. Some of them haven't even figured out if they want to write yet. But it's so open to possibility. And I think when you're writing, you should write that way.

One of the most profound lessons I ever got was from a student. The student asked to meet with me during office hours, and as soon as he got in he started crying. I was like, "Dude what's up?" And he asked if I've ever thought of how many times in the course of a day or a week or a year or even an hour as a writer he comes across stories in print, stories in film, stories in TV that link mental illness to crime. I never thought about it. And he said, "As a mentally ill person, I think about it all the time. I am the villain of 90 percent of these stories." And he was right—the dissociative disorder serial killer, the schizophrenic murderer. But most people with schizophrenia are just trying to get through the day. People with mental illness are rarely a harm to anybody, and when they are, they're mostly a harm to themselves. So the whole idea of a maniac killer out there killing people and stripping their fingers, it's not that. The whole idea that it must be the manic depressive person who rapes such and such—no, it was Chuck. It was the cool dude down the street. It blew my mind. And it also made me incredibly ashamed at some of that stuff. I don't think I've done it, but I certainly was cool with the deranged killer. But a lot of the people who commit these crimes, they aren't insane. They're assholes. Dylann Roof is not mentally ill. He's programmed. If you spend all day on Stormfront and you listen to Nazi stuff and you start to believe right wing radio, you're literally programming yourself to think of somebody different from you as lesser than you. Of course he's going to kill them.

You’ve talked a lot about growing up in Jamaica’s homophobic society. I’m curious if, now that you’ve had all this success, you feel like your country is embracing you.
The thing I want to make clear to people is they always embraced me. A qualified embracement at some points where people don't think about your private life or blah blah blah. But I've always been super popular in Jamaica. I've been embraced from my first novel. For me, I want more than being embraced, I guess. I want to casually walk down a street holding a dude's hand and not think about it.