This Booker-listed epic set in Aids-era Kingston is a triumph \u2013 bitter, bawdy and ravishingly queer<\/p>\n
\u201cA sense of sweep,\u201d replied Marlon James, when asked what moves him most in literature. \u201cSweep isn\u2019t just about external journeys, but internal as well. It can be over years and decades, or across land and sea.\u201d If that explanation is still hazy, pick up his mighty new novel,\u00a0which is longlisted for this year\u2019s Booker prize and is tirelessly \u2013 sometimes exhaustingly \u2013 grand and peripatetic. Mounting a grisly expos\u00e9 of Jamaican homophobia, this polyphonic 640-page doorstopper is an emotionally bruising narrative that roves \u201cuptown, downtown, ghetto and gully\u201d through Aids-era Kingston with sidetrack excursions to 1950s England and a closing leap to 2000s United States.<\/p>\n
The novel\u2019s defining event is a gruesome mob attack on eight queer men who have clandestinely come together to work on bringing John Herbert\u2019s 1967 gay prison play, Fortune and Men\u2019s Eyes, to the stage. The\u00a0goal, in the words of director Havelock Titus, is to shatter \u201cthe whole fragile myth of Jamaican male sexuality\u201d. \u201cBecause prison,\u201d he explains, \u201cis the ultimate male institution and yet masculine sexualities that could never happen outside in the normal world flourish in there all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/0e3a200b55d47c954325a20ada3cc282e0d56634\/27_43_4648_3718\/master\/4648.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=61a3768a7653e9e4fefba057dc05cc6d\" "\\"The")
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