A Brief History of Seven Killings

OK I will come right out with this: I didn't enjoy this nearly as much as I expected to, and having given four and five stars to this authors first and second books, I am left with a sense of disappointment to only give it three and a half (four) stars. Booker Prize winning (2015) and highly rated by a lot of other reviewers, it has some great things going for it, and some that troubled my reading.

It is a long book, at a bit under 700 pages, and it contains a lot of characters. These are typically not problems for me. Each character who narrates a chapter (or chapters) has a unique voice - those who are Jamaican write as spoken in patois, using what seem realistic slang words and sayings. Again, this is not normally a problem for me, in fact it is a very appealing aspect of books by this author and Irvine Welsh, amongst others. I actually enjoyed this a lot, and I think it helps to key in the characters in the reading. It is also relatively violent, and contained some well scripted swearing - not that these features were concerning - in fact other readers had flagged these, and neither matched up to a level I had pre-conceived, so no concerns there. Then, of course there is the whole Bob Marley aspect. While this bumped up the appeal before reading, and the attempted assassination was a major event in the book, being referred to only as ‘the singer', and not really containing any real detail about Marley, this became a bit of a non-event, which is some ways was disappointing. Finally, some of the stream of consciousness ranting in a couple of the chapters just went on too long for me.

So what was it that made this only 3.5 stars? Firstly, I felt it was over-long - not in terms of page count, as that doesn't matter as long as the story is right - it felt over-long because there was peripheral information or content which just didn't feel necessary (to me). It is not in my nature to complain about this, or to dislike level of detail information, so this could be that I didn't put in enough effort into the reading, and perhaps these details would have come alive if I had concentrated harder, or was less distracted? Secondly, I struggled with some of the connections (of the characters) and relationships. On retrospect, I suspect this is purposeful from the author, as part of unravelling the web is solving the connection, but again - concentration is necessary to keep all the strings in mind.

There is also a fair bit of Jamaican politics in the book. Without an prior knowledge, there is enough explanation to feel your way through with a low-level understanding, but some personal research might have helped me understand (but I lacked the effort to do this). Also enjoyable was the strong female character, who was probably the most fleshed out of the characters, along with a couple of the bad men.

I am not heading down the road of talking plot or outline, there are too many other reviewers who have done so much better and more precisely than I would, so I will leave it at this.