Marlon James's 'The Disappearers' Longlisted for Booker
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- The Disappearers is Marlon James's 640-page novel longlisted for this year's Booker Prize, with judges calling it a "reckoning" and the reviewer deeming it "incontestably also a haunting"
- The novel centers on a gruesome mob attack on eight queer men clandestinely rehearsing John Herbert's 1967 gay prison play "Fortune and Men's Eyes" in Aids-era Kingston, Jamaica
- Eddy Porteous, a "white-ish" Belgian Jamaican college student, narrates the expository first quarter through diary entries; two of the eight attacked men later vanish without a trace, driving his search alongside fellow actor Jordan
- Jordan, a foul-mouthed sometime prostitute who obsessively reads John Rechy's 1977 "The Sexual Outlaw" for affirmation, becomes "the novel's beating heart" and the Jamaican homophobe's "battymonster" come to life
- Reggae singer Streggeh Don's hit "Batty Is Not Pussy" functions as the rallying cry for the attackers, who include a policeman, a self-loathing closet case and a deacon — with violence depicted from inside the perpetrators' minds, not just the victims'
- The review notes structural flaws: the narrative sags in places, its debt to Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon" veers into self-conscious pastiche, and key action is reported via interview transcripts rather than dramatized
- The novel draws on a queer literary canon including Gide, Genet, Vidal, Wilde, Baldwin and Holleran, with James's prose praised as "bitter and hilarious, lyrical, bawdy, pugnacious and scorchingly, ravishingly queer"
Why it matters: James — already a Booker winner for "A Brief History of Seven Killings" — pivots from what the reviewer calls his earlier "glib relish" of violence to an "unequivocal ethical purposefulness," placing readers inside the perpetrators' minds to dramatize homophobic atrocity as volitional rather than abstract. The longlisting amplifies a rare mainstream literary reckoning with Jamaica's anti-gay violence and the Aids epidemic's toll on its queer community.
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