By Marlon James

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

Atrocity novels are tough to pull off.

And what, you might be wondering, do I mean by an “atrocity novel”? The term sounds pejorative, and I want to be very clear: I don’t mean it that way. I’m talking about novels which take real atrocities as their subject matter or context: novels about, for example, American slavery, the Holocaust, the Gulag. The term “atrocity novel” is merely my shorthand for describing this kind of story – it is in no way a judgement. ‘The Tattooist of Auschwitz’, for example, is an atrocity novel. ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ is an atrocity novel. ‘Beloved’ is an atrocity novel.

And ‘The Book of Night Women’ is an atrocity novel.

Atrocity novels have to do two very different things at the same time.

The first thing that they must do is depict. They are set, deliberately, during humanity’s lowest moments: they must show why these moments are, in fact, atrocious. They must communicate to the reader, intelligently and vividly, what the human experience of atrocity is like. They must describe it, bring it home to the reader with force. Ideally, they will do this with force commensurate to the atrocity.

But atrocities are characterized by brutality, savagery, and despair. We remember them because of the depth and scale of the suffering that occurred within them. And because of that, they are tough to read about.

And novels, on the other hand, are, well, novels: unless you are in a high school English class, they are optional. People read them because they want to, not because they have to, which means that novels have to draw the reader in, engage them, and keep them hooked until the end. They must have a character, or a story, which calls and holds the readers’ attention.

I think it’s really hard to balance these two things. At novel-length, stories which make you confront human atrocity can be grueling. Too much suffering, too much brutality examined up close, exhaust the mind and alienate the reader. It’s not that we don’t care – it’s that the mind needs breaks from horror. That is why this kind novel is so tricky: how do you keep the reader engaged and alert while not flinching from the truth you are trying to portray.

Of course, an atrocity-novelist can lean away from brutality, but people chose to write about atrocities because they care about them. If an author is writing a novel about the Holocaust, it’s because they want their readership to think about the Holocaust, to feel its human cost.

‘The Book of Night Women’ is the third book I’ve read by Marlon James. He’s a remarkably strong author – he can move from place to place, time to time, voice to voice, with confidence and competence. He leans into setting, relying heavily on dialect and backdrop, which is normally really aggravating but which he somehow manages to pull off.

‘The Book of Night Woman’ is Lilith’s story. Lilith is born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the 18th century. Born with bright green eyes, Lilith enjoys special treatment during her childhood, though she does not know who her mother or father are.

One day, another slave breaks into her cabin ands tries to rape her. When Lilith kills and dismembers him, only the help of another slave, Homer, saves her from retribution. Homer, Lilith will learn, is a Night Woman, a group of female slaves who meet in secret. Together, they are planning to overthrow the plantation owners, liberate all Jamaican slaves, and kill every white person on the island.

Any novel which takes, as its subject, the effect of slavery on the human soul is going to be a brutal read – there’s really no getting around it. The slavery practiced in the New World was off the particularly inhumane and soul-crushing variety, and any story which takes an enslaved person’s perspective is going to confront that. That confrontation is the whole point. The challenge that James had in front of him was to make his readers feel the brutality without grinding out their ability to connect with the story.

By the way, I am not trying to problematize that confrontation; on the contrary, I think it’s an urgent moral priority. Literature and film are our most effective artistic vehicles for forcing people to acknowledge the past. What I am trying to say is that I think Marlon James has done a really good job of it in ‘The Book of Night Women’.

There is no way to describe Lilith’s life as anything but agonizing and terrifying, and James allows that to inform every aspect of her person. But he doesn’t let it overwhelm her – she manages to remain distinct from her context even while being embedded within it. She is informed by it, but more than it.

And James somehow manages to accomplish that piece of character building without flinching in any way from the horrors of plantation slavery itself. There is nothing trite about ‘The Book of Night Women’ – no saccharine triumph of goodness over evil, no inviolability of the human spirit, no moral redemptions. Lilith is a brutalized soul – she routinely bears suffering that most of us cannot even really imagine. And James somehow manages to show Lilith’s suffering while also remembering that she is a person.

At the risk of sounding trite myself, that might be the highest possible thing a book like this can achieve. The reason that slavery is an atrocity is because it was practiced on human beings. The only way to acknowledge that atrocity is to depict the humanity of its victims both within and without the atrocity. Reducing them to their suffering misses their humanity; focusing solely on the human story without the atrocity diminishes the moral repulsiveness of keeping humans in bondage.

I think Marlon James is a tremendous moral novelist, capable of expressing his characters’ humanity and the injustices inflicted on them with equal clarity. He does not betray his individuals for the sake of scope or force, reducing them to suffering. Nor does he spare his readers the depth of the sufferings inflicted on his characters. Rather, he blends the two into something greater, more moving, than the sum of its parts. I think he is very deft, very wise, and very honest. It’s rare to find these three qualities in a single novelist. I admire him.