In a country like Jamaica, where consensual sexual activity between men remains illegal, a large shopping bag can serve a secondary purpose. In a memorable scene from Marlon James’s new novel, The Disappearers, which begins in 1988, a young man who is coaxed into a toilet stall for sex steps into said bag so that “whoever comes checking will see two legs, not four.” For all the situation’s inherent hilarity, James is making a more serious point: in Jamaica, being caught in the act can spell death.
James’s novel has been long-listed for the Booker Prize; the title evokes all those men, and more rarely women, in Jamaica whose lives have been erased by murder, exile, or AIDS because of rampant homophobia. “It’s the first book where the characters’ stakes mirror my own,” James writes in the novel’s brief introduction, “even if I am still lucky never to have been one of the characters in a Marlon James novel.” After a decade spent writing fantasy fiction, The Disappearers is James’s first literary novel since A Brief History of Seven Killings, his 2015 Booker Prize winner about the 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley.