The popular image of Jamaica is of an outpost of pleasure, with shimmering white beaches, James Bond seducing sexy women in mountain resorts and Bob Marley singing his gorgeous songs of unity and love. But it's also one of the more dangerously homophobic countries on earth.
That reality forms the backdrop to The Disappearers, the blazing new novel by Marlon James, the gay Jamaican writer who won the 2015 Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings, and will probably win again for this one. Giving us, as one character says, the Jamaica underneath the Jamaica we know, this fiercely personal book doesn't merely tell a story. It carries you off like a tidal wave. Churning with passion and ideas, history and wit, graphic sex and graphic violence, the book howls with so much pain and anger.
Spanning the AIDS-shadowed years from 1988 to 2005, The Disappearers is tricky to describe because it's divided into five parts, each with a different tone and central figure. It begins in high spirits with the diary of Eddy Porteous, a white-skinned, bi-racial student who lands a role in the production of an openly queer play. There he meets the three other key characters: handsome Matt Chin, a mysterious soul whom Eddy fancies; the velvet-jacketed Havelock Titus, the worldly older man who's directing the play; and above all, Jordan Brown, a cynical, would-be sexual outlaw who's been thrown out of his home and lives by hustling.
All their lives change when a rehearsal is set upon by a gay-hating mob that's led by a famous reggae singer and includes guys trying to exorcise their own homosexual feelings. These louts batter the cast and crew with billy clubs and tire irons, gouging out one victim's eyes and murdering another and then sexually desecrating his body. When the survivors get taken to the hospital, they're treated coldly by medical personnel who believe they deserved their wounds.
While this vicious assault is only a tiny part of the book, James makes it indelible. And far from gratuitous. Like such towering modern novelists as Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Roberto Bolano and Elena Ferrante, James uses physical violence to explore social violence, the structures of oppression that its victims must fight to survive.
Indeed, the majority of The Disappearers follows the main characters as they try to cope with what's befallen them, often tying themselves into emotional knots. Some, like Matt, simply vanish — with Eddy and Jordan trying to find him. But the others disappear in different ways — lying low, going into exile, getting AIDS, making a protective heterosexual marriage, sinking into madness or setting out on a secret path of Dragon Tattoo–style vengeance. Jordan — who says he "wants to kill the [****ing] world" — has a searing encounter with one of the men who brutalized him.
The Disappearers makes you feel in your gut how scary and isolating it was to be gay in '80s Jamaica, a land so homophobic that parents demonized their own children and crowds cheered on the cops who beat them. Yet if James' main achievement was to simply to show us this bigotry — or to suggest that it's wrong — his novel would be no greater than an article in The Atlantic or an earnest Sundance movie.
In fact, what makes the book unforgettable is the raw energy of James' storytelling, his ability to conjure up all the many textures of lived experience, including hope. He takes readers deep inside his characters and deep into their world, from the local nuances of skin color and class to the way that fear can actually heighten sexual pleasure. James evokes the precise atmosphere of a Kingston gay bar, the luxuriously debauched lair of a pedophile diplomat and the post-apocalyptic vibe of "the gully," the underground drainage ditches where queer youth in demotic Mad Max garb take refuge after being thrown out of their homes.
At times James feels his story so intensely that some sections go on a bit too long. But I don't mind that in a book whose epic ambition carries us from Kingston to '60s London to 21st-century Miami and back again to Jamaica. The Disappearers plunges us into darkness and makes us feel how it is to live and to love within it. At one point the director, Havelock, addresses himself to an imaginary audience of what he calls "first-world gays:" "Your biggest fear," he says," is that you will be rejected. ... My biggest fear is that I will be burned to death."
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