Jack Cameron Stanton
Marlon James’ The Disappearers, shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, begins when eight gay men secretly meet to rehearse a queer prison play. It’s Kingston, 1988. Jamaica has been whipped into an AIDS panic. Gay bashings occur in Kingston with impunity. The actors gather to perform parts of themselves hidden away from the rest of Jamaica, all the while envisioning the play as a small act of defiance against their homophobic society.
Most notable among the men are Eddy Porteous, a young man figuring out what his sexuality means in a world that persecutes it; the troubled, abrasive Jordan Brown, disowned by his rich family and hardened by street living; Matt Chin, an elusive figure who assumes multiple identities; and the director, Havelock Titus, who hopes their adaptation of John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes will blow “open the whole fragile myth of Jamaican male sexuality and homophobia”.
Fatefully, a gang of hateful gay bashers called the Blackjacks discover the rehearsal and commit an atrocity, killing one of the actors, leaving another with their eyes gouged out, and traumatising those who survive.
From this premise James expands The Disappearers into a true maximalist novel, writing in many voices and documenting the progression of the gay men’s lives from 1988 until 2005. It comes equipped with a list of characters, something readers of James’ Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings will recognise, along with the distinct polyphonic writing style. Heavily voice-driven, the narrative constantly fuses the profane and the lyrical, Jamaican patois with bookishness.
The Disappearers isn’t dramatised. It’s documented. James uses several faux documents, such as letters, diary entries and interviews, to report the events. Post-atrocity, the brunt of the novel revolves around Jordan and Eddy searching for two actors who disappeared “like thieves in the night”. As the title declares, The Disappearers is occupied with exploring the many forms of disappearance: not only the physical but ways of self-erasure, of vanishing within a society. The documented style of the novel reveals a second, more vital thematic than disappearance: the cost of remembering.
The survivors of the gay bashing are haunted by it. They are all, in their own ways, “frozen in 1988”. The play, which never occurs, is a spectre in their lives, a reverberating what-if. Jordan Brown, a loose cannon at the best of times, cultivates a warped and hateful sense of vigilante justice as he hunts down the members of the Blackjacks whose lives continued “like nothing happened”. Eddy Porteous, the only cast member absent during the attack, is racked by survivor’s guilt, while Havelock Titus, the director, whose small act of defiance exposed the boys to their suffering, finds himself their reluctant keeper.
James offers complex portrayals of his gay characters. In contrast, the Blackjacks are exaggeratedly wretched to the point of grotesquerie. They are handed the microphone in the second act, in which they spout lovely one-liners such as “The Devil is a faggot and demons are in his semen” and “Sodom was the wickedest city in creation and God did have to destroy it”. The biblical references expose their broader belief: what appears to the reader as cruel, senseless violence is seen by the perpetrators as noble persecution. Or, in Jordan’s bitter words, not “a crime but a national service. Think of how many potential cases of AIDS they prevented that night.”
Zooming out from their interpersonal clashes, we see James constantly engaged in situating violence and homophobia in broader discourses of class, race, sexuality and religion. This is the novel’s greatest elegance. It is the type of maximalist fiction that enlivens history into something more real than real.
There’s a long history of queer fiction embracing the transgressive powers of sexual desire. James signals the novel’s continuation of this tradition by having Jordan Brown carry around John Rechy’s The Sexual Outlaw like a manual for how to live. It emboldens Jordan’s rejection of “normality”: “normal was as broad and loose as the f---ing universe, whereas abnormal was just one thing”. It shows other ways to exist.
I should mention that The Disappearers is an extremely horny book. The politics of pornographic representations in fiction range from gratuitous to artfully subversive; James belongs to the latter. His characters have a lot of sex and recount their sex in vivid detail, in part to provoke the heteronormative reader by making visible and explicit what has been historically repressed. On a deeper level, the characters fixate upon and self-define according to their desire because their entire subjectivity has been filtered through the prism of their own sexuality. James deftly illuminates how the characters grappling with identity are doing so within a larger system that excludes and erases them.
Remembering, forgetting and disappearing are all entangled in The Disappearers. They are the traumatic responses that come to define the men’s lives. In the closing scene, one character fails to recognise another. This cruel act of forgetting is a bleak, devastating and therefore beautiful ending to Marlon James’ magisterial return to Jamaica, full of hot blood and heartbreak.
The Disappearers by Marlon James (Hamish Hamilton, $35) is out now.