Vivid episodes and heart-rending sequences turn out to be dreams – or nightmares. Characters flit between genders, shift from one colour to another, toggle between human and non-human status. Much of the novel is a curtain-play of rumour, cover-up, dissimulation. Is this all a ruse? Early on we’re told: “Lie was truth and truth was a shifting, slithering thing”. It’s Heart of Darkness for video gamers, a colonial-era catalogue of cliches about Africa Later, he says he has “no guise … no look”. “I have always been an edge man,” he admits, “always on the coast, always by the boundary.” He claims he has no real self and that he has forgotten his original name. Like the emotionally scarred detectives in Scandinavian crime fiction, he’s often gruff and elusive. In a novel so dizzyingly populated, where geographies multiply and stack up, where the boundaries between the real, surreal and flat-out fantastic seem increasingly fluid, Tracker has to be a point of anchorage, someone to rely on and to care about.
Not just the quest for the child, but the success of Black Leopard, Red Wolf itself. Albinos, bush fairies, antiwitches, dirt mermaids, grass trolls, vampire lightning birds, alchemists, mad monkeys, malformed twins, cannibals, vampires, a leopard, slavers, queens, ghosts, sorcerers, comely eunuchs, lots of shapeshifting entities, lots and lots of prostitutes, and many characters – such as Giraffe Boy and Smoke Girl – who sound like poor-selling stuffed toys you might find at the back of Poundland.Ī lot rests on Tracker.
What a menagerie of creatures he encounters on his odyssey. He’s tireless too, sometimes yomping but more often drifting effortlessly across jungles and forests, rivers of ill repute, whole regions that are off limits to all but the most intrepid or rapacious traveller. He’s a fearsome fighter, vicious, endowed with a phenomenal nose that lets him sniff out poisoned drinks and enemies lurking miles away. The setting is a heady, fever-fabulated version of precolonial Africa, but who is the child? Some kind of a prince? Tracker is just one of a group of mercenaries vying with each other to recover him. He’s a hunter, a mercenary, and it’s his journey in pursuit of that young boy that drives the hulking, exhausting first volume in Marlon James’s Dark Star trilogy. So when I give words of the boy’s death, do I write my own death with it?” Voicing these anxieties under interrogation is Tracker. There is nothing left to know.” Even that much information may be too revealing: “I hear there is a queen in the south who kills the man who brings her bad news.
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