Book Review: Black Leopard Red Wolf (2019)

Black Leopard Red Wolf is a dark and fascinating undertaking. Marlon James' fantasy world is grim, bleak, and utterly captivating. It makes the A Song of Ice and Fire series read like a romp through rainbows on a magical unicorn. After six hundred pages, I only have a tenuous idea of what actually happened in the novel, which feeds into its major theme of stories, truth, and lies. Overall, it's awful and awesome, terrible and beautiful, and an intense first entry in the Dark Star trilogy.

Black Leopard Red Wolf is set in pre-colonial Africa and tells the story of Tracker, a young man with a special talent for finding the missing. The main plot of the novel is the search for a little boy, which Tracker narrates to his unnamed captor, in pieces and in haphazard order. The gist of it is, a group of mercenaries are hired to find the child, and their journey is fraught and exhausting.

Marlon includes a great many subversions into his epic, a glaring one being Tracker's personality. Instead of a shining hero of few words, he's downright bitchy to everyone he meets, always ready with a snark, an insult, or a threat. Tracker has issues: daddy issues, mommy issues, intimacy issues, etc. But at the end of the day, he has a moral center, cares about the weak and helpless, and is capable of nobility and sacrifice. He also establishes his street cred in the very first chapter, recounting how he went to the underworld to retrieve a drowned king, battling shadowy ceiling demons in the process.

This is where the novel shines, with its vivid descriptions of terrifying mythical monsters and the humans who do monstrous things. There are shapeshifting hyenas, the flesh eater Asanbosam and his bloodsucker brother Sasabonsam, Ipundulu the lightning bird, witches, Ogos, mysterious portals called the Ten and Nine Doors, and more. There's a lot of violence, the least of which is babies and children being left out in the wild to die. It gets much worse than that. Tracker must overcome so much while accompanied by people he barely trusts, who have their own reasons for wanting to find the boy.

Tracker endures through it all, frequently outsmarting his foes, and proving himself at least capable of decency, which is rare indeed in the warring North and South Kingdoms. He has lived to tell his tale, which may or may not be riddled with falsehoods, because Tracker does. Not. Give. Any. Fucks.

Please pardon my French, I am having vapors from all the swearing and filthy language used in this book. It would have an R rating if it were a movie, and not just for the words--there's a lot of action too, if y'know what I mean! While I wasn't a huge fan of all the expletive-laden dialogue, they do underline the fact that honey, this is not Kansas, this is a Marlon James book and you better recognize what you're walking into.

In conclusion, Black Leopard Red Wolf stands out as a fantasy novel for its difference: I've never seen settings, characters, and a narrative structure quite like it. I await the next installment with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation.

TL;DR: Recommended for readers who thought A Game of Thrones was too happy.  

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This post brought to you by swimming! It's good exercise!