MOON WITCH, SPIDER KING
By Marlon James
Marlon James’s 2019 novel “Black Leopard, Red Wolf” was described as an African “Game of Thrones” — fantasy fiction on adrenaline, written by a Jamaican winner of the Booker Prize. I can’t remember the last time I was so excited about a book, and I bought a hardcover copy on the day it was released. That night, I took my first dive into the Dark Star trilogy.
It didn’t go well. The storyteller, Tracker, spoke as if I were already well acquainted not only with the bizarre land he inhabits, but also the inner workings of his mind. As fishwomen swam past and mutantlike children scuttled across the ceiling, there was no gentle narrator to chime in with the equivalent of “What is a hobbit? I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays.” Instead it was as if I had woken up in a stranger’s hallucinogenic nightmare, and as I feebly felt my way around, I began to suspect this wasn’t a place I wanted to spend my time. There was an awful lot of spilled entrails, bodily fluids and, in James’s words, “funk and stink.” More troubling was the sexual violence perpetrated on men, women and children, sometimes described graphically and frequently with disturbing nonchalance. Even consensual sex often had the taint of disgust and cruelty.
I adjusted my expectations and soldiered on. After all, it was being compared not to “The Fellowship of the Ring” or “The Eye of the World,” but to the darker, more lurid “Game of Thrones.” And clearly James was forging something else altogether, with elements of superhero stories, African folk tales and sword-and-sorcery fiction; within that kaleidoscope, he was exploring the mutable natures of identity, power and morality. After 100 pages, I knew I was deep in the imagination of a voracious reader and brilliant inventor. But I was searching for the warm pulse of the story and failing to put my finger on it. When “Black Leopard, Red Wolf” was named a finalist for the National Book Award, I picked it up one last time, admitted defeat and set it aside.
Now here comes the next book in his Dark Star trilogy: “Moon Witch, Spider King.” It is the same story, or at least aspects of the same story, this time told by Sogolon — motherless bush girl, thief, royal companion, mother, assassin and avenger. The Moon Witch herself, who in “Black Leopard, Red Wolf” is something of a treacherous adversary. I confess, I was intrigued. James has said that the trilogy is nonlinear, that a reader can start with any of the books, and so once again, I ventured forth.
Sogolon’s childhood is grim from the start. She is shackled to a termite mound, mistreated and starved by her father and brothers, who blame her for her mother’s death. On the first page, though, this little girl’s tenacious spirit rears up, and she is planning her getaway: “And if toe fall off, she will run on heel, and if heel fall off, she will run on knee, and if knee fall off she will crawl.”
So begins the bildungsroman of a character scrappier than Arya Stark, cleverer than Jane Eyre, as foulmouthed as any gangster, with the world-weary humor of a noir private eye and the inscrutable morals of an antihero. In a kingdom cursed with forgetfulness, where self and truth are never as simple as they appear, Sogolon seems to have an iron compass at her center. “You are the no name girl,” people say to her, and without hesitation she fires back, “I have a name.”
The main thread of “Black Leopard, Red Wolf” runs through this plot as well — the search for a mysterious boy — but Sogolon knows the boy’s origins and the trouble he could bring. Her greater desire is to hunt down her nemesis, the Aesi. And as a reader, I am much more interested in Sogolon herself.
For nearly 200 years, we follow her as she goes from whorehouse to royal courts, from fight club to monkey forest. Everywhere, she is overlooked and underestimated, and in her invisibility, she finds freedom. She learns secrets by keeping her mouth shut and listening. She teaches herself to read in part by befriending a military commander who has lost all memory except what he has scribbled across the walls and floor of his room. She hones her fighting skills by watching illicit combat matches, then binding her breasts and competing as “No Name Boy.”
Sogolon is not only willful, quick and resourceful, but also immensely powerful. She can bring distant voices closer to her ear, snuff out flames and explode enemies like overinflated balloons. At first, the power is beyond her command. In a particularly moving passage, Sogolon inadvertently kills a man who is trying to rape her, and afterward she grapples with her shame and fear. “At night it feel worse,” James writes, “a thing that take over a side of her head, quiver down her shoulders, and tremble on her fingertips, a thing that make her want to cut her skin open and climb out of it.”
Everything about Sogolon is thorny. She resists friendship and love, even as she grieves the dead. She scoffs at the idea of justice, even as she delivers it. To critics who hail the rise of the complicated-mother character, I offer Sogolon, who gives birth to a litter of lion-cub shape-shifters and considers bashing in their heads, but instead allows them to nurse at her breast.
During the course of more than 600 pages, Sogolon lives a dozen lives and is haunted by a hundred ghosts. “Let us make this quick,” Sogolon often said, just as I was trying to catch my breath. The book is told in the syntax of a dialect: Verbs are left unconjugated, and words are shuffled around. I reread sections to try to understand who was speaking and what was being said. Then a line of pure poetry would stop me in my tracks: “Is still night. The great crocodile done eat half of the moon.”
I have other gripes. The flow of bodily fluids is still relentless, and there is to my mind an excess of crudely referenced orifices and thrusting male genitalia. Rape is again ubiquitous and graphic. This time, however, there is the Moon Witch to avenge the victims: “She always come in darkness and leave with no trace, just as night leave day.”
While Sogolon is the strong, beating heart of the story, she is by no means its only fascinating character. James conjures up vampires, swamp trolls, dragons, a lightning-wielding madwoman, a bedeviling water sprite that takes the form of a black blob, an island that is really the back of a giant fish, the terrifying Sangomin children and “ancestor in the form of smoke, ghost in the form of dust.”
The cities of this world rival any creation of Italo Calvino. The city of Go regularly rips itself from the ground and floats high above the clouds. Another city is powered, horrifically, by slaves who are confined inside the walls and roped to pulleys and gears.
James’s imagination is vast and fiery, and his numerous fight scenes are heart-pumping and vivid. But what has stayed with me are his more subtle observations on the human condition, how people don’t run away from terrible situations only because they don’t know where else to go, how love is like fear, grief is like fury and revenge can never be as satisfying as you imagine.
There are many easy-to-enjoy novels that I pass on to friends in our Alaska neighborhood, recommend to my well-read grandmother or wrap as birthday gifts to my father. This isn’t one of those books. A reader must enter the Dark Star trilogy of her own volition, with eyes wide open. But the Moon Witch lit my path and showed me how a woman might navigate this dangerous, remarkable world. “It’s surprise she can expect, and disappointment she can depend on,” James writes. “The other things, goodness, kindness, fairness, loyalty, decency, those are the things that come out of nowhere.”
When I finished the last page of “Moon Witch, Spider King,” I found my copy of “Black Leopard, Red Wolf” and started at the beginning — “The child is dead. There is nothing left to know.”
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