The Book of Night Women
By Marlon James
Oneworld, Hardback; 417 pages, ISBN 978-1-85168-708-4
Price: £12.99

Hardeep Chohan

In this powerfully rendered novel, Marlon James leads the reader into the murky and traumatic world of slavery in the West Indies of the eighteenth century. Casting a sustained and unflinching gaze upon the inhumanity and aggression suffered by a workforce of black slaves at the hands of their white masters, the book does not follow the easy temptations of sanctimonious caricature, but rather treats with equally thoughtful attention the masters as they slowly degenerate into dark, broken existences.

The novel revolves around Lilith, who has from birth been singled out by her uncommon green eyes: a mark of her violent inception by the white ‘massa’. James unfolds Lilith’s story throughout the novel, foregrounding her desire to rise above her slave identity and her sense of superiority over those around her, both of which draw her enemies from many camps. A group known as the Night Women—led by the mysterious, steely nerved, and aptly named Homer—is the plantation’s locus of collective rebellious energy. Homer takes Lilith into her fold, but this magnanimity eventually leads to a tempestuous struggle between the two women who each want to be authors of their own narratives of freedom.  The reader is plunged into the horror of broken spirits, shattered bones, and the chilling figure of the quilt of scars that marks Homer’s back. Our gaze is forced towards the gibbets and the lashings that they live under, as well as the psychological onslaught they suffer not only from their masters, but also as a result of antagonism among the slaves themselves.

James charts the workings of oppression and the struggle to overcome the desperate and vicious world that it creates. Homer teaches Lilith and the other women to read, a core motif in many narratives of aspiration. They plan an elaborate attempt to ruin the plantation and to finally break out of their literal and psychological chains. Fire becomes a powerful motif, as does the relentless image of the circle. With resonances of the eeriness of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and of the colonial inhumanity of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, James astutely meshes together a story which explores what freedom means and if it can ever really exist. Turning over The Book of Night Women’s final page,  one feels  a horrible and sobering sense of history’s nightmarish weight.