Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings ****

A Brief History of Seven Killings is a kaleidoscopic epic about rival posses in 1970s Jamaica and the wider forces that fueled their violence. It is not brief (686 pages) and features countless killings. The story covers a couple of decades, but it swirls around one central event: the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in December 1976.

Numerous characters take turns as narrators. Their distinct voices and points of view are the best thing about the book. Many of them use Jamaican patois, with a few explicitly calling out the differences between American and Jamaican slang. The sense of time and place is strong. When we're introduced to the CIA section chief in Kingston, for example, he vividly describes the knock-off fast food restaurant King Burger: Home of the Whamperer. One stylistic decision I found distracting was always referring to Bob Marley as The Singer. It felt like an abstraction in the midst of palpable concrete details.

The story takes place over four time periods: 1976, 1979, 1985, and 1991. The portion in 1970s Jamaica is far stronger with its Cold War politics and local color. When the story moves to 1980s America, it simplifies into a story about the drug trade and loses its distinctive flavor. The narrative voices start to all sound the same; for example, I had a hard time telling the two gay characters apart even though one was a Jamaican and the other was a white guy from Chicago.

Franz Nicolay, Band People ***

Driving home one evening, I heard the author interviewed on KQED's Forum. The book is about the life of working musicians, and the discussion about group dynamics in a (rock) band immediately resonated with my feelings about what's missing in my work groups. Thinking of the technical writer as the bass player in a band is a great metaphor for communicating my views on proper collaborative behavior.

Some bands consider all of their members to be equal partners, others have a core of members supported by "hired guns." Who gets recognized as the artists and who are the (mere) support personnel? The distinction has an impact on how the music develops and, of course, on how the various players feel about their contributions. There is a hierarchy among the instruments, with singers, guitarists, and keyboardists being more recognized as artists than the rhythm section is. (Interesting fact: this discrepancy is enshrined in copyright law, which allows copyrighting of lyrics, melody, and harmony, but not rhythm.) Lou Reed is considered the writer of "Walk on the Wild Side" even though its most distinctive feature is its bass line. In short: session players are vital contributors to the success of a song, but they are sometimes seen as replaceable service providers.

Band People consists of excerpts from interviews with over 50 working musicians, interspersed with material from sociological studies of "cultural production" and workplace relations. The book is written and organized like a college research paper that had one editorial pass. Nicolay arranged his voluminous source material into categories, found an academic epigraph for each category, and threaded the interviews together. The musicians have interesting insights, but Nicolay doesn't construct any arguments or extract any explicit lessons from them.

I found myself attracted to two of the bibliographic sources from which Nicolay quotes: the academic Art Words by Howard Becker and This Wheel's on Fire by Levon Helm.

Daniel Mason, North Woods ****

The main character in North Woods in a plot of land in the forests of western Massachusetts. Each chapter tells the story of the occupants of the land, starting with lovers who flee a Puritan colony and including non-human protagonists such as a catamount, a scolytid beetle, and invasive plants. There are murders, abductions, sibling rivalry, artists, ghosts, a con man, a schizophrenic, stories told in a variety of styles from poetry to conference lecture. It's an enjoyable amalgam whose theme is ecological succession.

The only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.