The Disappearers - Marlon James
This is what AIDS is after all, isn't it? One long set of disappearing acts. First is watching the friends and family disappear. Second act is when people try to disappear you. Third act is watching your body vanish from itself and wondering where the fuck you going, piece by piece, until all of you gone. I swear to God, at one point I used to think people with AIDS just evaporate. If there is a fourth act, it's when everybody erased you name as if you were never born in the first place.
I received an advanced reading copy of The Disappearers from the team at Hamish Hamilton and Penguin UK, which I'm very grateful for.
This is the last book on this year's Booker Prize longlist that I've read, and I don't really know where to start when it comes to reviewing jt. There's so much going on in The Disappearers that trying to summarise it feels like a fool's errand. It's a book about queerness. It's a book about Blackness. It's a book about the long shadow British and American colonialism left over Jamaica, and about the way British and American cultural hegemony still shapes queer spaces and ideas of race and gayness even now. It's about masculinity, rage, justice, revenge. I could keep going. There's simply too much packed into this novel for me to do it justice in a review.
For the first 200 pages I thought this was going to be my favourite book on the whole longlist. It felt like the thing all the other books had been circling around thematically and emotionally without quite landing on. Those 200 pages are an absolute shotgun blast of violence and hatred and aggression, some of it turned outward, some of it turned in on itself. It reads like a scream. It's one of the most gripping opening sections I've read in a long time, and it is very difficult material. It's violent, it's explicit, and it does not let you look away from any of it.
If explicit sexual content isn't something you want in your fiction, this isn't the book for you. There's a huge amount of sex in here, and very little of it is the tidy, comfortable kind. It's messy, bloody, dirty, aggressive. There's a lot of non-consensual material woven through it too, sitting right alongside the violence, and it's often hard to tell where the line between consensual and non-consensual is. This feels like a response to the sanitisation of gay culture that we've seen in pop culture in recent years, gay sex and love cleansed and smoother over and repackaged to appeal to straight white women who have no idea what cruising is, who would be horrified to step inside a sauna, who have no idea what Polari is. This is unbridled, unfiltered, and unapologetic. The effect is that the book grabs you by the face and forces you to look. I was completely in its grip. James's control over his prose here is remarkable, and I loved being swept along by it.
Then the middle section arrives, and the rage is still present but the pace drops away. This is where the book started to feel like a lot, in a way that I think is entirely deliberate. It becomes a relentless, grinding tide of abuse that never lets up, and I think that's very much the point James is making about the queer experience, particularly the queer experience in Jamaica under the shadow of AIDS. Understanding that it's intentional didn't make it any easier to read, though, and I found myself worn down by it. It became a slog to get through, and however purposeful that slog is, I can only review the book by how it actually made me feel while reading it, and by the middle stretch I was exhausted.
The good news is that it recovers. The final 150 pages are every bit as urgent and visceral as the opening, and the book is absolutely worth pushing through the middle section for if you've got the stomach for the rest of it. This is not a comfortable book. It's not spicy or romanticised queer fiction smoothed out for easy consumption. There's a line partway through that stuck with me, where one character rails against "first world gays" who assume their national exceptionalism should be the model for how the rest of the world experiences queerness. That's not the central thesis of the novel, but it's very much present throughout, and it's part of why I've found this such a hard book to actually review.
As a white queer person, there's a great deal here that isn't mine to speak to, and I don't think I have any particular insight to offer on what the book is doing with Blackness and queerness together. What I can say is that I liked it, that the writing is excellent, and that it feels urgent in a way that matters right now. With the current rise of anti-queer and anti-trans sentiment across the UK and US, and the way that inevitably ripples outward into other countries through that same cultural hegemony the book is interrogating, this feels like an important book to have out in the world at this particular moment.
Ranking it against the rest of the longlist is difficult. Taken purely as a novel, that sagging middle section does knock the score down a little for me, so I've landed on an 8 out of 10. That puts it alongside a handful of other books from this year's Booker season that I've also scored an 8, but I think The Disappearers carries more weight and urgency than most of them, so it's going in third on my personal ranking, just behind my top two.
That's the last of this year's longlist ticked off. It's been a proper journey, with some really great books along the way, and The Disappearers is one of the strongest of the lot, even if it asked more of me as a reader than most. You may not find that middle stretch as gruelling as I did. If you do, stick with it. It's worth it.