Interviewing Marlon James

Marlon James got longlisted for the Booker Prize this morning, here's an interview I did with him a couple of years ago

It’s two weeks before Christmas and I’m in the plush library bar of the Hudson Hotel on New York’s Upper West Side, waiting for Marlon James. I’ve garnered a sofa away from the live music and I’ve got my notes and a tape recorder in front of me. I’ve just finished Marlon’s new novel Black Leopard Red Wolf which is a high fantasy novel set in an alternative history Central Africa of about a thousand years ago. I’m bursting with questions and sipping a ridiculous cocktail. I’m one of the first people to read this book outside the publishing house and I’m excited because with this interview I can scoop the world about Marlon’s new direction.

Suddenly my phone rings. It’s Marlon’s assistant. Marlon has fallen off his bike and has been rushed into hospital for surgery. Would it be ok to cancel? Of course, I tell him, is Marlon all right? He needs surgery on his foot but he’ll be ok.

Cut to two months later.

It’s February 1^st and Marlon James is everywhere. His face is plastered in every magazine and bookstore window, his New Yorker profile is the talk of the town, The New York Times has just released a lengthy interview and he’s apparently got into some kind of war of words with HBO about the film adaptation of his Booker Prize winning novel A History of Seven Killings.

Now I’m in Williamsburg, Brooklyn at the Wythe Hotel just a few blocks from his house. He walks in with a slight limp in a light suede jacket, jeans - no hat. The temperature outside is minus 17 degrees Celsius. I shake his hand. “Aren’t you cold?” I ask him.

“No brother, this isn’t cold. I live in St Paul for the autumn and part of the winter. They know how to do cold in Minnesota.”

He sits next to me on a leather sofa in the decidedly chilly lobby of the hotel. He takes his jacket off while I rebutton my coat. James was born and grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, where frigid temperatures weren’t an issue. Both of his parents were police officers, his mother rising high in the detective bureau while his father became a lawyer.

I ask him about St Paul and if he knows the poetry of John Berryman who is one of my favourites.

“He jumped off a bridge, right? The words can drive you mad sometimes.”

“Indeed. So, what do you do to stop the words from driving you mad?”

“I listen to jazz.”

We spend ten minutes talking about Miles, Mingus, Coltrane, Monk. I ask him if he listens to music to get himself in the mood for writing.

“All the time. During the process.”

“Don’t you find it distracting?”

“Not at all you should see my office.”

He takes out his phone and shows me a photo of his writing office in St Paul. It’s amazing. There are books, journals, albums everywhere. The walls are filled with quotations, ideas, pictures of African slaves, warriors, kings, queens, witch doctors, photographs of random people from the street.

His desk faces a window. Years ago Ian Rankin had told me that your desk should face a blank wall so you can write without distractions. Marlon scoffs at this concept. He likes looking out the window seeing faces, dogs, weather and sometimes slipping them immediately into his writing. He teaches English and composition at Macalaster College in St Paul and he clearly loves his gig, hanging out with students who are always bursting with ideas.

“What advice do you pass on to new writers?”

“Start at the end and cut the boring stuff. Do the end and its aftermath. The first rule is: don’t be boring.”

“That’s Elmore Leonard’s rule as well,” I say.

“Oh I love him.”

“Me too. I met him a couple of times. Lovely bloke,” I say, remembering a green room in Miami where Leonard had given me his email address and told me to email him if I was ever blocked in a story or just wanted to chat about the writing process. Alas I’d always been too embarrassed and scared to do that.

Marlon’s new novel Black Leopard Red Wolf is certainly not boring. In the first twenty pages the hero Tracker is imprisoned, sexually awakened, kills a family member and visits the underworld.

“What’s the most boring book you’ve ever read?” I ask him.

“Trollope, The Warden,” he answers immediately.

I nod in vague agreement and don’t tell him that of Trollope’s oeuvre it’s the one I liked best because it was written in Belfast.

“So, you’re a crime writer?” he asks me.

“Yes.”

“I’m addicted to Tana French and Denise Mina. You know them?”

“I do and they’re both great.”

“I love Ireland. The Dublin Murder Squad sounds like just the Kingston Murder Squad.”

“Well, they say that Ireland is a cold Jamaica.”

Marlon hasn’t heard that one and he laughs and agrees. He tells me a story about him and Colum McCann going to Dublin for Bloomsday. I ask him if he ate the Leopold Bloom breakfast of slightly burned kidneys and he says that he was offered that but declined. He seems to have remembered his Bloomsday experience until about 3pm when the serious boozing took over.

Marlon is a Joyce fanatic and we talk about various stories in Dubliners some of which he has read more than a dozen times. He can’t resist showing off his knowledge of ‘The Dead’ and he recites the “snow was general all over Ireland” bit with flying colours. We talk about memorization of poetry and prose and he thinks it’s a crying shame that high school kids no longer have access to poems in their heads the way previous generations had. He asks me how many Yeats poems I can do from memory and I tell him that it’s probably six or seven which pleases him greatly. We circle back to Dubliners and I ask him which feels like the most Jamaican story in the book and he says that the sense of danger and the uncanny in ‘An Encounter’ really impressed his as a child studying for his GCE exams in Kingston.

He asks me if I’ve read Anna Burns’s Milkman and I tell him that I’d reviewed it for the Irish Times and raved about it. He says it’s the book he’s going to read next but he got worried after the panning Milkman got from Dwight Garner in The New York Times. I suggest that perhaps Garner missed a lot of the very black Belfast humour in the novel.

“A lot of people miss the humour in my books, too!” he says with a laugh. He’s on a roll now and really wants to unpack the Ireland/Jamaica comparison; he asks me if I’ve read Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies. I have and he tells me that his school in Jamaica (Wolmer’s Trust High School for Boys) was exactly like Murray’s fictionalized version of Blackrock College. He was viciously bullied there and called ‘Mary’ instead of Marlon. “Kids are perceptive, man,” he says. “They had figured out I was gay even before I had.”

My only memory of Blackrock College was the hammering they gave us in a rugby match and I ask him if his school was sports obsessed and whether he was a sporty kid. He says that the Wolmer school made him play water polo, a game he detested. I mention that Captain Archer on Star Trek: Enterprise is the only person fictional or real I have ever come across who liked water polo. This leads to a long, nerdy and occasionally heated Star Trek discussion which I will skip over here. Suffice to say that Marlon is a Nex-Gen guy and I’m TOS.

Reading and records were Marlon childhood escape from Kingston’s violence and his growing awareness that he was different from the other boys. He dreamed of getting out to England or America and meanwhile read everything he could get his hands on. Shakespeare, Dickens, Stephen King and comics, lots of comics. We discuss Love and Rockets and Heavy Metal and Alan Moore’s Watchmen. I finally steer the conversation back to Black Leopard Red Wolf. “So why epic fantasy?” I ask.

He explains that to him now, just as when he was a kid, genre distinctions are essentially meaningless. “Man, it’s bullshit to say there is ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature. There are only good books and bad books.”

I tell him I loved epic fantasy as a boy and we trade authors we loved and chat about how great it is to see a map at the start of a novel. As a graphic designer he drew all the maps himself for Black Leopard. He’s been drawing maps of fictionalized worlds his whole life, he says, and he really regrets not finding anyone to play Dungeons and Dragons with as a kid. I tell him that my experience of D&D was a ratio of one hour actual playing time to four hours fighting about the rules.

We talk about Ursula Le Guin and JRR Tolkien. I ask him about China Mieville’s famous critique of Tolkien’s reactionary ‘whiteness’ and Marlon goes off on a very funny rant about how unhealthy and pale everybody looked to him in John Boorman’s Excalibur. “English people do not look good with their clothes off on film,” Marlon suggests which I attempt to disprove immediately by offering the example of Helen Mirren from the same film.

Now that he knows I know my shit, he asks me what I thought of Black Leopard. I tell him that to me it reads less like high fantasy and more like a picaresque novel in the mode of Pantagruel or Gulliver’s Travels. Marlon is fine with that comparsion. I ask him if he was maybe influenced by Angela Carter in the writing process? And he excitedly tells me that Carter is only a recent discovery – a recommendation from his friend Salman Rushdie who knew her well in the 1980s.

We go off into a delicious fanboy sidetrack about Carter which leads naturally enough to a discussion of sex in fiction.

“There’s a lot of sex in Black Leopard, proper sexy sex with ejaculations and everything,” I suggest and Marlon is delighted that I dig this. For him French and Latin American literature is far ahead of English lit in the way it treats sex seriously.

I look at the clock. This interview was only supposed to last an hour and we’ve been chatting now for over two. I thank Marlon for his time and again hatless, he walks me to the subway stop.

“You’re really not cold?” I ask him.

“No, man, seriously spend a winter in Minnesota and you’ll know cold.”

“I’d rather just read about that vicariously through one of your books,” I tell him.

“Maybe I’ll write the Great Minnesota Novel,” he jokes. “But I have the two sequels to Black Leopard to finish first.”

“I’ll look forward to that,” I say and shake his hand again, shivering my way down into the subway and wondering if the Great Minnesota Novel line can be the ‘scoop’ that I was after.