The Book of Night Women

Photograph: CJ Gunther

Jamaican writer Marlon James’s new novel of slavery, The Book of Night Women, is not for the squeamish. But then again, Gone with the Wind notwithstanding, plantations weren’t the most romantic of places. James has given us an epic novel of late-18th-century West Indian slavery, complete with all its carnage and brutishness, but one that, like a Toni Morrison novel, whispers rather than shouts its horrors. Dedicated “to the railroad of bones” left behind, The Book of Night Women takes off immediately in a feverish, bewitching patois. Chapters often begin suggestively (“Every negro walk in a circle. Take that and make of it what you will,” goes one refrain), before launching into fire, brimstone and drama.

And drama there certainly is on Jamaica’s Montpelier Estate, with its tangled web of power relationships between house and field slaves, overseers and their white underlings, masters and mistresses. James’s eye is unflinching: There’s rape, torture and mutilation; runaway slaves, captured slaves, castrated and lynched slaves. Rebellions simmer and brew, and incidents of sadism and madness run rampant. No one—masters or chattel—escapes the degradation, the squalor, the mental and physical disfigurement of this inferno-like land.

But, again like Morrison, James’s greatest interest here is the plantation’s women. How are they controlled, compromised, betrayed? At the heart of the novel is the conspiracy of a coven of house slaves whose vision of an islandwide insurrection is both apocalyptic and redemptive. But just how much blood, and whose, will have to flow first? That is James’s essential subject, and he pursues it until every last drop has been squeezed out.—Anderson Tepper

James reads Mon 23 and Tue 24

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