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    John Crow's Devil
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    John Crow's Devil
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    John Crow's Devil
    Ebook256 pages5 hours

    John Crow's Devil

    By Marlon James

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The incredible debut novel from 2015 Man Booker Prize winner Marlon James

    Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize

    "A powerful first novel...Writing with assurance and control, James uses his small-town drama to suggest the larger anguish of a postcolonial society struggling for its own identity."
    --New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice

    "A Brief History of Seven Killings might have won the Booker, and Black Leopard, Red Wolf might be the next Game of Thrones, but if you're looking for an entry point into the much-lauded, highly raucous mind of Marlon James, his 2005 debut could actually be the place to start: it's just as powerful and intricately written as James's later works, but it's quite a bit shorter, and easier to carry around with you everywhere you go, something you will surely want to do."
    --Literary Hub, 10 Debut Novels Nobody Reads Anymore--But Should

    "Elements coalesce in a Jamaican stew spicier than jerk chicken. First novelist James moves effortlessly between lyrical patois and trenchant observations...It's 150-proof literary rum guaranteed to intoxicate and enchant. Highly recommended."
    --Library Journal, Starred review

    "Set in James's native Jamaica, this dynamic, vernacular debut sings of the fierce battle between two flawed preachers...an exciting read."
    --Publishers Weekly

    "A mesmerizing treatise on the nature of good and evil, faith and madness, guilt and forgiveness, eloquently captured in a microcosm of society."
    --Booklist

    "John Crow's Devil engages the political legacy of Frantz Fanon without sacrificing the power of fiction...There's a temptation to compare John Crow's Devil to novels by Toni Morrison or Earl Lovelace, among others, and there are certainly similarities to those works in this one. There is even an echo of Faulkner in the meticulous, multi-vocal rendering of conflicts entrenched in village life. But more important than any comparison is that James' debut is very much its own book, and stands as tall on its own as it would with any other volume beside it."
    --Small Spiral Notebook

    This stunning debut novel tells the story of a biblical struggle in a remote Jamaican village in 1957. With language as taut as classic works by Cormac McCarthy, and a richness reminiscent of early Toni Morrison, Marlon James reveals his unique narrative command that will firmly establish his place as one of today's freshest, most talented young writers.

    In the village of Gibbeah--where certain women fly and certain men protect secrets with their lives--magic coexists with religion, and good and evil are never as they seem. In this town, a battle is fought between two men of God. The story begins when a drunkard named Hector Bligh (the "Rum Preacher") is dragged from his pulpit by a man calling himself "Apostle" York. Handsome and brash, York demands a fire-and-brimstone church, but sets in motion a phenomenal and deadly struggle for the soul of Gibbeah itself. John Crow's Devil is a novel about religious mania, redemption, sexual obsession, and the eternal struggle inside all of us between the righteous and the wicked.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAkashic Books
    Release dateSep 1, 2005
    ISBN9781936070343
    Author

    Marlon James

    Marlon James was born in Jamaica. He is the author of John Crow’s Devil (Oneworld, 2015), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and The Book of Night Women (Oneworld, 2009), which won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction. His third novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings (Oneworld 2014), won the Man Booker Prize in 2015, the American Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Fiction Prize, and was a finalist for the International Dublin Literary Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His short fiction and non-fiction has appeared in Esquire and Granta. He is currently the Writer-in-Residence and Associate Professor of English at Macalester College, Minnesota, USA.

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    Reviews for John Crow's Devil

    3.5/5

    7 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      PEARL RULE 9 (p74)I realized I need to leave the read behind here:"Shhh. Don't work your head about it too much. The Lord has forgiven me and as His faithful servant, I have forgiven Pastor Bligh. You know where he is?""Yes, Apostle.""Send him a message for me. Tell him that Apostle York says that he can come back."And here we go round the houses again. I liked the dialect that Author James uses in the story to delineate what everyone knows, versus what is being narrated:The plate was empty and refilled in minutes."Mind you choke," she said.The Widow appeared to smile but then she pushed her chair back into the dark before the {Rum} Pastor could confirm it. She ate nothing herself. Dinner was a noisy clutter of mouth sounds. Lips and gums slapping food with spit and teeth slicing, tearing, and chomping the whole thing down to paste, followed by the glorious gulp of a swallow.He was the only one doing the eating, so she must have been doing the watching. Women loved to watch men eat, he thought. It was the last blast of primal energy that the hunter-gatherer had left to show.***"Jeezus Christ! Him have fits!" said a man beside Bligh as he fell."Rahtid," said another."Unu fling this spoon in him mouth quick!" shouted the young bartender. "Bout him want bottle! You know say is a whole o Johnny Walker him go fi drink?""Him still a fits?""Is the Devil in him. Me read that in tha Bible," said the man nearest to Bligh, holding onto the spoon he had shoved in the Pastor's mouth.It's a technique used to make the story move and still retain the tang of Otherness this supernatural tale imparts. That's very effective, and to my mental ears very euphonious. I'm just not that deeply drawn in to the story. Rum Pastor Bligh's besetting sin is drink. I get it. Because I'm told explicitly why earlier in the story, I wasn't that interested in following his trajectory; because the very beginning is The End, I know where we're heading; and in the end, I just didn't feel like the view was worth the travail.Such a shame I didn't read this when it came out. I'd've liked it much better at forty-five than at sixty.
    • 5/5
      Near perfect first novel set in Jamaica. Two reverends battle for the soul of fledgling Jamaican village in the late 1950's. James uses a voice that many readers may deem difficult to follow, at first, but really I found it quite easy to slip into the dialect that he implements. It is a fine specimen of terse literature that gets out of the story's way and takes the reader out of their comfort zone without ever letting the reader think about putting the book down.Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      A story with a touch of magical realism and a heavy dose of religious fervor. Set in the author's native Jamaica at some point in the 1950's, it is the story of the battle between two flawed individuals, each who try to take control of a small fictional town.

      John Crow's Devil is an amazing first novel, with extremely interesting, well-developed characters. It's an interesting take on sin vs redemption. Neither the Rum Preacher or the Apostle are quite what they appear. It is easy to mock the townspeople of the fictional Gibbeah, but see if you can make it to the end of the story without being manipulated into looking at characters and actions in a particular way.