The Disappearers

Dwight Garner stopped hedging in the New York Times. “Why not just say it?” he asked, and then said it: James “has written a masterpiece, the novel of the decade and possibly of the century thus far.” The Booker judges were steadier when they longlisted it, praising dialogue “sharp and propulsive” enough to move “from the painful to the darkly hilarious within a single exchange.” That range holds because James writes eight men rehearsing a play in 1988 Kingston almost wholly in Jamaican creole, which the Wall Street Journal hears as “abrasive auditory rhythms” rather than local colour. Stephanie Burt in the Atlantic came away calling it “never nihilist,” a strange verdict on a book about a killing, and the reason seven of nine reviewers ended up raving.

640 pages, and the Guardian's Yagnishsing Dawoor thinks you will feel every one of them: the narrative “sags in places, tarrying where it should speed along.” His sharper complaint goes to the form, because so much of the book reaches you secondhand that “a significant chunk of the action is reported rather than dramatised,” which leaves the loudest moments summarised at a remove instead of played out. Jessie Lethaby in the Sunday Times heard the same slack rhythm, finding it “repetitive, like we are covering the same ground again and again.” Kirkus recommends the book and still warns that it “stress-tests your senses,” the pitch and the caution in one sentence. One early reader put the cost plainly: “I respected the novel more than loved it.”