The Jamaican writer Marlon James won international fame with A Brief History of Seven Killings, which was awarded the Booker Prize in 2015. That title misled—the book describes dozens of killings, not just seven, and it is by no means brief—but its premise delivered. The 700-page novel, his third, revisits the Jamaican election of 1976 and the assassination attempt on Bob Marley that year; the gang truce of 1978; and the violence that preceded and followed, first in Kingston, then in New York City during the 1980s and early 1990s. Lots of Americans, myself included, learned some pivotal Jamaican history and some Jamaican English and patois from its many troubled narrators.
Most of those narrators seek political power, bloody revenge, wealth, or journalistic glory. The sole woman in the array—the only consistently sympathetic narrator—wants instead to disappear: “Shut everybody out. Shut everybody down. Just go.” She even pores over How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found (it’s a real book). “Whether on a plane or in a box,” she muses, “I was going to leave this place.” James, who grew up in Kingston and now splits his time between New York City and Minneapolis, has said the same about himself: “Whether it was in a plane or in a coffin, I knew I had to get out of Jamaica.”
The Disappearers, James’s new novel, shows why. Brief History studies men who want to rise, to dominate, to become stars; this one focuses on men who try not to be seen. It’s James’s most clearly autobiographical work. Of its five main narrators, two share his age, background, and interests, and one of those misses out on the worst of Jamaica’s violence and ends up, as James has, in a stable job with an advanced degree. It’s also James’s first realist novel since Brief History—he published two long works of complex, bloody, mythological fantasy in between.
This time, he writes about Jamaican men who have sex with men (only some would call themselves gay). Eight of them assemble in a Kingston home in 1988 for rehearsals of the Canadian playwright John Herbert’s 1967 prison drama, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, under the direction of Havelock, a confident, queeny émigré who’s returned from England. Speaking in Jamaican English, as most of the characters do, he explains that it’s “a gay play about men loving and sexing and rule over other men.”
None of the men who gather at the house on Lady Musgrave Road is a professional actor. All responded to flyers or heard about the play through word of mouth, and the five central narrators take turns admitting us into their minds. Eddy, a bookish university student and one of the James-like pair, combines his literary interests with a craving for porn; his passion for indie rock and X-Men comics alienates him further from his peers. Jordan, who lives in his car and hustles to survive, becomes almost a doppelgänger for Eddy: He likes comics and alternative rock too, and reads the same sort of literary books as Eddy.
The group also includes a mysterious half-Chinese businessman whom Eddy can’t help finding hot; wealthy Omar, who funds the rehearsals; and three other actors. All discover, during and after rehearsals, some imaginative refuge—a space for people who, as Eddy puts it, “can’t leave but can’t stay.” They chat and flirt and grumble about what parts they’re assigned. One actor objects to playing a drag queen. Men feel they have to protect their manhood, even in this private space.
Then the violence descends. A posse of men finds the house and beats almost everyone bloody or worse, using blackjacks, nunchucks, knives, fists, a crowbar, a cricket bat. James depicts the aggressors’ thoughts in a short Faulknerian fugue. At least one of the attackers is closeted: “Kill it in them, kill it in me.” Two are cops. Another’s a reggae star whose big hit “Batty Is Not Pussy” advocates killing gay men. (Batty is Jamaican slang for “rear end,” and battyman is an insulting term for gay men.) James’s made-up star recalls the real musician Buju Banton, whose breakout track, “Boom Bye Bye”—which he’s since repudiated—also extols gay-bashing and murder. The mayhem leaves one actor dead, another blinded, and the rest hoping to rebuild, or more likely flee, their prior lives.
The remainder of the novel follows the survivors as Jordan and Eddy attempt, separately and together, to track down those among them who have gone missing. Parts of interlocking stories unfold in the narrators’ divergent voices. Havelock writes delightfully ornate letters to his former lover in England. Jordan and Eddy relate their own travails through recorded interviews with a journalist named Petra, but also describe, in the first person, their days and years. Jordan ends up with the most eventful character arc, ultimately tracking down perpetrators too: He wants them to pay, or at least not to disappear.
Brief History looks at power in a place of violence and examines what secrets it hides. Now James has written a book about people whose whole lives feel like secrets. And he has a thesis: Those who grow up learning that they are bad and do not deserve to exist—people who might get raped, maimed, or murdered for trying to be themselves—almost inevitably organize their life around attempts to disappear, escape, or else retreat to the margins, becoming (like Eddy) figures who observe others, themselves unseen, or (like Jordan) agents of vengeance who stick to the shadows.
“There is a Jamaica underneath this Jamaica,” Jordan tells Eddy, whose more sheltered and luckier life means he might not know. It’s a metaphor, except when it’s not; the drag queens, trans women, and unhoused youth who live in Kingston’s gullies, below street level, have made it literal, as Eddy and Jordan, in flight from another mob later in the story, show us. James makes the gully dwellers and their fragile world a compelling side story, intent on presenting a panorama of Kingston’s gay life, from those who occupy the economic heights (also literal hills) down to “all of them queens and freaks and fishboys and battymen” who “cannot and will not pass.” The survivors of Lady Musgrave Road flee to totally closeted respectability, “a safe place filled with disappointment,” where several remain for years; or else to opportunities off the island, or religious rebirth, or a near-invisible secluded life “at the top of a mountain.” We might see the whole novel as an attempt to create a stage, a space, where gay Jamaican men can honestly and fully appear, at least in retrospect.
Like Brief History, The Disappearers offers a big, modernist assemblage of contrasting styles, personas, and points of view. It, too, is a work of classic realism, touring the social layers in a changing Kingston as its characters earn and lose money, rise and fall. But unlike Brief History, which includes gay characters but mostly isn’t about them, The Disappearers also belongs with those earlier chronicles of gay America that Jordan and Eddy name-check, especially John Rechy’s The Sexual Outlaw. And so it’s full of gay sex: ecstatic, conflicted, reluctant, a desperate secret or an open secret.
James acknowledges occasions of sweet, mutual, that’s-how-it-should-be sex—but those happen largely offstage. Most of the on-page couplings instead mix, alarmingly, sex with violence. Some people seek humiliation; some want to inflict it. Some get hurt by their tricks. James manages not to kink-shame anyone, but he’s less interested in kink education than in displaying a sexual world where every hookup comes with scary risks: assault and battery, for example, or public exposure, or HIV in the age before retrovirals. Living in fear of “the AIDS” entails its own “long set of disappearing acts”—not just sickness and death, but shame and denial and an inability to mourn.
Those risks do not keep most of James’s survivors from pursuing, or becoming, hookups and rent boys and hate-fucks, with and without proper lube and enemas, which the novel—appropriately, even necessarily—describes: Responsible writing about anal sex has to mention those things, and James does. He wants to bring his gay men’s sex lives into the light. The men, however, keep trying to “erase themselves,” learning how to “make yourself into the kind of person nobody wants to see.” Early on, Eddy claims, “I don’t think about it a lot,” and yet he’s never unaware of being “part of an us that people just want to beat to death.” Or bury alive.
The novel opens up many pleasures for literary readers, in its pacing, in its observations, and especially in the ventriloquism of Havelock’s old-school prose (he even writes one letter in the obsolescent gay slang Polari). But it’s not, mostly, a book about pleasure: These lives are often—realistically—scary or sad. We should not label them tragedies, though, because that implies a controlling divinity, or at least a fixed fate. As Havelock insists, “We need to stop calling atrocities tragic.” The Disappearers is, among other things, one novel responding to many atrocities.
When you grow up surrounded by people who hate you for what you are and whom you love, it’s tough to disentangle their hate from self-hate, and either one from a wish to die. And it’s not just the cast from Lady Musgrave Road that conflates self-destruction with self-fashioning, death with destiny. So does the music of Kurt Cobain, the most important among the cultural touchstones that give Jordan and Eddy alternatives to Kingston. They listen to Nirvana, and to the rock bands that Cobain recommended—“music that people who hate me don’t like,” Jordan says—more than to “Peter Metro and Admiral Bailey” and other hitmakers from the island.
[Stephanie Burt: A strange time to be trans]
Major characters also find allies in older gay novels, like Rechy’s, and in comic books. “Come to think of it, my life is exactly like X-Men. I served a world, in this case the world of cool boys,” Eddy decides early on, “only to have those same boys abuse and brutalize me.” The heroic mutants of Marvel Comics—Nightcrawler, who looks like a devil; Storm, whom one gully queen resembles; and the rest—promise one way to survive the Kingston experience, even though, in the particular issue of X-Men that Eddy covets, the X-Men literally disappear.
Renaissance writings—Shakespeare’s sonnets and King Lear, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II—give James additional scaffolding for his stories about attachment and found family, literal torture and tortured love. The strongest subplot links the fate of Eddy’s half-Chinese crush back to the sonnets, as well as to Herbert’s play. The weakest subplot turns Jordan into an obsessive, predictable avenger, less like one of the X-Men than like a Jamaican Joker, with a twist that’s no twist at all if you’ve seen horror films. Yet up to that obvious final act, the Eddy-and-Jordan pairing works elegantly, showing two sides of the same damaged face.
Still, any reader will feel for Jordan when he exclaims, late in the novel, “My ghost suffering makes me want to scream.” He means both that, compared with people dying of AIDS, he isn’t genuinely suffering (though he is), and that he feels like a disembodied outcast, a kind of ghost. The Disappearers ends up as a violence-driven protest, a scream of rage—like Nirvana’s final album—against a world that keeps trying to kill people like him and then pretends that they asked for it, or that they never existed. The novel is a superbly fashioned instrument for showing what felt wrong, what went wrong, in Jamaica in the late 1980s and ’90s, and what’s still wrong in other places, too, where people who grow up marginalized get blamed for their own persecution, or else celebrated as brave exceptions when, against the odds, they succeed.
The fantastic unfairness—especially if it’s as brutal and direct as what James depicts—might make you a vanisher or an avenger (like Jordan). Or it might instead make you a chronicler (like Eddy and Petra), a maker of memorials, even a rescuer for people who want to be rescued—people who get sick of trying to disappear. And some do: Most of the survivors from Lady Musgrave Road, however wounded, find a way to forge on. Some (like Havelock) even keep trying at “building something—I don’t know, a safe place, a room of one’s own and world so you can let your hair down so to speak?”
In James’s wildly patriarchal Jamaica, the struggle to live as a gay man means a struggle to become and remain some kind of man, whatever you like to do in bed. Life is, or seems to be, all about men: Women appear in the book but never narrate (as one does in Brief History), and barely say how they feel. That’s part of the point of The Disappearers, in which the same men who persecute gay desire want women to disappear. As in any binary opposition, men learn to define themselves against their supposed other: “Nothing more shameful for a man than to be treated like a woman,” one character thinks, an idea all too familiar in the contemporary United States as well.
Among the seven people who survive the Lady Musgrave Road assault, James traces some future for all but one: outside or inside Jamaica, in sham marriages that fail or desk jobs that allow them to subsist, and even in fragile, comforting, long-delayed reunions. As for that one actor who just drops out of the plot, maybe he died. After all, his “own family prefer him gone.” Or maybe that person was never a man in the first place and built a solid life elsewhere as an adult woman, her boyhood deleted for good—what trans people in earlier generations called “woodworking” (fading into the woodwork).
Within The Disappearers, that’s one character’s speculation, dismissed as soon as it’s raised. But it’s also another hint of hope. And this novel, which ends in 2005, does offer hope: not just for gay Jamaican men but for trans teens, nonbinary adults, and anyone else since then who’s felt as though their society has kept asking them to hide, or lie, or die, or just go away. The Disappearers is a harrowing book, to be sure, but never nihilist, or defeatist, or cynical. Its joy in ultimate survival comes through.
This article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “Invisible Men.”
The post Invisible Men appeared first on The Atlantic.
