“The Disappearers” Stages the Pain and Pleasure of Jamaican Gay Life
Marlon James’s novels, though they range from historical fiction to high fantasy, share a distinct spiritual frequency—a mix of bravado and bereavement. They are heroic in their scope, ambition, length, extremity, variety, unclassifiability, and apparent impulse to wrestle an entire world of external phenomena and internal experience between two covers. Yet this muchness tends to orbit a central absence. In James’s third book, “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” from 2014, a kaleidoscope of action and intrigue whirls around an artist known only as the Singer—a stand-in for Bob Marley—who departs from Kingston after an assassination attempt. The novel, a Talmudic compendium of multiplying, entangling plotlines, established James as a literary eminence, and made him the first Jamaican author to win the Booker Prize. In the wake of its success, he published two installments of a daring new project, a planned epic trilogy rooted in African mythology. James, invoking “Game of Thrones” as a touchstone, said that he’d been longing for “Black pageantry”; the works delivered verdant settings, Tarantino-esque blood spatter, and horseback riders in “flowing red robes, black armour, and gold crowns topped with feathers.” But all this manifold spectacle is triggered by a quest for a boy, possibly of royal lineage, who has gone missing. The first line of the first book seems to void everything that follows. “The child is dead,” the story begins. “There is nothing left to know.”
Does loss cancel out the life happening around it, or can life and loss coexist? James’s books are explicit and sensational, full of graphic depictions of sex and violence. There’s a sense of abundance and duplicity: the sprawling casts feature raving soliloquists, undercover agents, and tricksters who pepper their seductions with asides about literature and philosophy. James, who publicly came out as gay in his forties, after the publication of “A Brief History,” is alert to the spectrum of manliness—how aggression can give way to an unprotected softness, and how virile swagger can veer into camp. He glues together the pulpy and the delicate, seesawing at times between shock value and earned emotional devastation, playing with the cartoonish nature of our most intense experiences. In his newest book, “The Disappearers” (Riverhead), a son congratulates his father on probably being the first parent to wish that his child was raped in high school. The father offers, “What I shoulda done is kill you in your sleep.”
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James is also evocative on the sentence level—in the same novel, a desolate character standing on a balcony hears a “little blue amoeba of pool” whispering to him from below. Phrases are turned a few degrees tighter than you’d expect from a writer who so rejects the cult of the single exquisitely resonant detail (why not a blizzard of details, some of which undermine one another?), and who has such an ear for speech. James’s dialogue fountains down the page, as if a tap has been opened. Life pours from him. There’s that vibrancy and, on the other side of the ledger, dead boys, ciphers, unfinished or unfinishable quests.
“The Disappearers” immediately showcases its author’s signature math of plenitude plus lack. It follows a group of gay men in Jamaica who seek love, connection, and restitution after a bloody homophobic attack. The explosion of malice effaces them in different ways, and James traces the mechanisms of their vanishing, examining how a person’s life can be compressed into smaller and smaller spaces. He seems preoccupied throughout by the simultaneity of having and losing. During a particularly ghastly scene, a character who’s dying of AIDS quotes “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: “Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink.” In its bleakest moments, the novel suggests that the ordeal of being gay in a venomously bigoted society negates its bounty.
Masculinity and its discontents are dominant themes for James, things that he’s explored with nuance and sensitivity in his almost etiological studies of violence. Gay desire has been more peripheral to his work, and is usually shadowed by danger. Queer characters filled out “Brief History” ’s taxonomy of social types, including Weeper, a ruthless enforcer and cocaine addict who slept with men in prison. Sent to oversee drug operations in New York City, Weeper discovers the East Village’s queer scene. It’s a netherworld of male-on-male hookups, adjacent to gangland and haunted by what one character calls “the gay cancer”—a veiled, subterranean setting that James uses to emphasize the mingling of invisibility, death, and pleasure.
If gay life and homophobia were once merely part of the Jamesian tapestry, “The Disappearers” puts these elements center stage. The book unfurls, playlike, in five acts. Each section has the feel of a dramatic monologue. James seems to be easing the reader in with Act I, a series of journal entries composed by the earnest, good-natured nineteen-year-old Eddy Porteous, who sees a coded flyer for a theatrical production and decides to audition. (It turns out that no auditions are necessary; just enough men have shown up for the director to cast the play.) The year is 1988, and the director, the stage manager, and the six performers offer a cross-section of that era’s gay life. Eddy hails from uptown; the director, Titus Havelock, was educated at Oxford; and the designated “top queen,” with blown-out hair and skin “smoother than the lotion he uses,” lives in a neighborhood where houses “look like shipping containers stacked together.” His name is Orrin, and he bears some resemblance to one of the main characters on “Get Millie Black,” from 2024, a Jamaican crime drama that James created for HBO.
The play that they will be staging is “Fortune and Men’s Eyes,” by the Canadian director John Herbert, about a community of incarcerated men. “Yes, there will be violence. Yes, there will be tenderness. Yes, there will be rape,” Havelock warns. Eddy, though, is more interested in his castmates, especially an acerbic college dropout and fellow comics connoisseur named Jordan Brown (“high, loose, curly hair . . . dimples”) and a guarded office worker who gives his name as Matt Chin. (“Brown. Tall. Half-Chinese-looking. Wide grin. Wow.”)
Eddy is a classic Nick Carraway bystander type, observant yet sweetly unaware of his magnetizing effect on the other characters. He’s stamped with the Jamesian trademarks of a smart mouth and pop-cultural fluency, dropping rat-a-tat references to Prince, Sinéad O’Connor, Bret Easton Ellis, “The Cosby Show,” and Bruce Springsteen (who owns “the biggest boss bulge in rock and roll”). Crucially, Eddy is also the only one of the players who can pass for white; when his journal entries end, so does the book’s innocence.
The chattiness of Eddy’s dispatches does little to conceal that the novel’s Jamaica is a grim place for gay men. A local university burns mattresses out of a fear of AIDS; even Eddy’s best girlfriend tosses off slurs. In the book’s second act, that malevolence erupts. A mob of men ambushes the players—minus Eddy, who isn’t there—at rehearsal, killing one actor and maiming the others. James roves among the attackers’ perspectives before and during the event, his experimental style, psychological acuity, and ragged lyricism on display. (“Lock yourself in a room let the dark and the heat boil you into a stew, let the heat go from fire in your skin to fire in your mind and blame that on them too blame them for even the dark.”) Also evident is the lurid hyper-violence that has occasionally caused critics to reach for words like “sadism” and “pornography” to describe James’s work. “I could make a charm bracelet out of all the teeth scattered on the floor,” one assailant jokes. A victim’s face acquires “two small wet holes that seem big like outer space; two bloody black holes where him eyes supposed to be.”
The rest of the book is aftermath. Upon being released from the hospital, two men disappear. Jordan, the dimpled college dropout, pursues vengeance, attempting to visit on the perpetrators of the assault what they instilled in him; James, as if stressing that the revenge plot constitutes its own gruesome genre, inflects Jordan’s story line with horror. For others in the cast, there’s respectable daytime Jamaica: church, work, loneliness. Havelock neither retreats to the closet nor holds out hope for resolution via vigilante justice. He moves into a hillside cottage—“the nearest neighbour is nearly a mile downhill”—and most days doesn’t “actually speak until the afternoon, if at all.” He reads, thinks, goes into town to earn a paycheck. “A quiet life,” he writes to a friend, before amending himself: “A sad life.”
In James’s hands, these branching options can seem to amount to distinctions without a difference. They appear to reflect the limitations of a world—Jamaica in the eighties—that disallows the happiness of gay people. Or Black gay people, at least. Eddy has been spared the worst violence; the novel casts his racial privilege as a kind of metaphysical exemption. The attack compounds his sense of exclusion, his already guilty conscience. Jordan, to whom scorn comes more naturally than grace, accuses him of envying the rest of the troupe’s ennobling misery. Do all Jamaican gay men, or possibly all nonwhite Jamaican gay men, have the same tragic story?
In the prison and in the play, “The Disappearers” finds two potent figures for gay life. The threat of the prison is that you’re targeted and unfree, packed into a queasy, pressurized intimacy with the most dangerous parts of yourself and others. The threat of the play is that you assume a role that obscures who you truly are. James, a sensitive diviner of both anxieties, chronicles how the inhospitality of the social world sends gay men into hiding. “We doing battyman hater work for them,” an elder observes. (“Battyman” is an offensive word for homosexual.) “Now it’s we who making sure we vanish.” What it means to collaborate in your own oppression—to use the master’s tools to add an annex to the master’s house—is a preoccupation for this author, who wrote, in “Brief History,” that “maybe is a ghetto thing where even if another man don’t destroy you, you going destroy yourself.”
But “The Disappearers” isn’t straightforwardly about self-contempt. Many of the characters don’t shun their homosexuality; rather, they see it as beautiful. Jordan says, in a kind of ecstasy, “I want to lick a nipple with thick hair around it, get my tongue stuck between two ass cheeks clamping down on it, shove my hand down either the front or the back of his pants and come away with the same funk, lick tobacco or mint off his tongue, inhale the breath that he snorts out like a bull, wrap my hands around his cock while he wraps around mine and we yank and pretend like it don’t hurt a little bit.” In James’s telling, a gay lover is a “bewitchment”; homosexual desire becomes a prison only when it causes you to be flattened and homogenized by suffering. During the cast’s first real rehearsal, the men struggle to articulate why they’re interested in theatre. One wants to feel brave, one wants to try something new, several seem defiant or to imply that they’re lonely. What they’re fumblingly vocalizing is a sense of possibility tied to the adoption of a new identity—a promise of self-creation that the mob manages to invert. Violence diminishes its victims, forcing everyone to play a single thankless role. “This attack,” Eddy tells Matt. “It changed you. It changed all of you.” When Matt points out that Eddy is stating the obvious, Eddy clarifies, “I mean it changed all of you into the same person.”
As the book proceeds, James blurs his actors together, in slightly eerie ways. Their stories aren’t interchangeable—some have endured a near-mythic amount of hardship, and others’ difficulties feel more ordinary—but the repetition underscores their commonalities: their repressive fathers, their chilly mothers, their vicious or bewildered classmates. Like James himself, the men are clever and bookish, writing letters or diaries, reading voraciously, and imagining themselves into tales of romance and Biblical comeuppance. They even speak one another’s lines. Matt lusts after “a runner whose living bulge bounces off one thigh then the other.” Jordan asks, in the middle of an ode to men’s bodies, “You ever watch a boy run, how everything flops on right thigh, then left?”
These overlapping, semi-porous characters search for one another, their paths intersecting. The questing and the keeping-tabs develop a mystical dimension; it’s as if the men have lost an incommunicable piece of themselves that they endlessly look for among their peers. Matt, whose perspective is largely withheld, remains the most enigmatic of the group, and the one most desperately sought after. James loans him elements of his own biography—memories and material that he’s talked about as part of his coming of age.
Still, the novel properly belongs to Jordan, a creation as canny and protean as the story itself. He’s a conflicted force of nature whose narration demonstrates James’s ability to execute rapid tonal shifts within paragraphs, to whipsaw into armored zingers from the heights of dreamy introspection. When Jordan first appears, during rehearsals, he comes off as self-protective, bright, and exasperating. After the attack, his witty, vulnerable voice holds together a chaotic and increasingly hallucinatory downward slide. He spies one of his attackers, a closeted man named Gareth, at a clandestine gay bar, and resolves to insinuate himself into his life, with the goal of eventually exposing him. The two start ambivalently sleeping together, and then dating each other. Throughout, terms like “anger” and “revenge” fail to express Jordan’s actual afflictions: the unbearable intimacies of identification, the ravages of sexual need. “Revenge never told me what revenge is supposed to be,” he says. “It just sits there like a fucking word.”
There’s a dark and delirious symmetry to the way Jordan and Gareth mirror each other’s self-hatred and desperate longing. The effect is claustrophobic, but, as with James’s other doublings, it’s also erotic, entrancing, and even freeing. The terror and the beauty of Jordan and Gareth’s assignations are that both men stop being able to tell themselves apart. Unsettlingly, the roles of victim and perpetrator bleed together. Who is seducing whom, and does it matter? Who is punishing, and who is being punished? These passages yield some of the book’s best writing. Likewise, James’s descriptions of cruising feel oddly creative, fluid, and primordial: at night, in a thicket of trees, it’s “all darkness and shadow and all touch and smell and taste,” Jordan thinks, and “a tongue is in my mouth before I say anything,” and “the hands refuse to stop grabbing, rubbing, and squeezing.” The fungibility of the hands is a reprieve from the book’s scenes of violence and its fallout, from the endless assigning of blame and the apportioning out of mercy or destruction.
In a tenderly melancholic moment, Jordan imagines a sexual encounter between two of his castmates—the novel’s tentative version of fulfillment. He pictures one of the boys thinking, mid-hookup, that “this shit is unreal” and seeking confirmation that “all of this is not some dream.” Of course, it is unreal, a play that Jordan is putting on in his mind. But it’s a play in which, unlike the larger drama that he and his fellow-actors have unwillingly been thrust into, the pain of being gay doesn’t nullify the pleasure. The role you inhabit can steal your future and imprison you in the past; it can also usher you into decent society at the cost of your soul (and it’s no accident that one of the narrowest closets in the novel turns out to be evangelical Christianity). But the permeability of James’s protagonists suggests that more than just these parts are possible. “The Disappearers” uses the tricks of fiction to pull off something extremely difficult: giving full weight to tragedy and injustice without implying that some lives are over before they’ve begun. ♦