When the first volume of Marlon James’s Dark Star trilogy appeared in 2019, it was quickly recognised as a masterly work of fantasy fiction, drawing comparisons with Tolkien, Angela Carter and Beowulf. Part quest narrative, part picaresque, Black Leopard, Red Wolf follows a man named Tracker as he weaves a trail through various lands, encountering a magical cast of shapeshifters, witches and powerbrokers in a seemingly never-ending search for a lost child. Yet, already in this first instalment, Dark Star was showing signs of something more complex than is usually found in fantasy, a quality that, in terms of a world culture, distinguishes the great epics of history, in which cosmic sweep is married with lyric detail to convey what the poet John Koethe calls ‘the generic lives /We all lead, interchangeable, yet every one a story to itself /Whose truth lies in its style’.
That humanist grounding is, perhaps, even more visible in this second volume, Moon Witch, Spider King, where the narrative shifts from Tracker to the witch Sogolon, one of his many adversaries in the first book. Now, we not only get to see the initial quest from her perspective; we are also shifted into a different time frame, a new worldview that, in many ways, dwarfs that of the man who had seemed to be at the tale’s centre.
It is a brilliant move, one that establishes a new vision for the trilogy as a whole and confirms Dark Star as a true epic, worthy of comparison to, say, the Mahabharata or the Nibelungenlied. Yet it also raises important questions about narratology in a postcolonial culture, as James explained to an interviewer last year. Citing Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon, often misunderstood in western culture as a mere compendium of unreliable narratives, he said:
I’ve seen Rashomon at least ten times… A lot of non-western storytelling flows this way.
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