NYT’s Novel of the Century? Marlon James on The Disappearers

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Where Great Minds Meet. I'm Senior Producer Mia Sorrenti. The New York Times has just dubbed The Disappearers as a masterpiece. The new novel from Booker Prize winning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings is described as the best novel of the decade, if not the century.
On today's episode, James joins host Mythili Rao to unpack the novel behind the acclaim. The Disappearers follows a violent incident set amongst untold history of the AIDS crisis in 1980s Jamaica. Let's join our host Mythili Rao now with more.

**Mythili Rao** (0:35)
You're listening to Intelligence Squared. I'm Mythili Rao. My guest today is Booker Prize winning author, Marlon James. His new novel is The Disappearers.
To start with, The Disappearers was recently long listed for the Booker Prize. You've won that prize before, but congratulations. All the same, it must be good to see your work recognized in this way again.

**Marlon James** (0:57)
Yeah, before it even comes out, so that's great.

**Mythili Rao** (1:00)
Get the sticker on the cover, right? People can see it and know what they have to look forward to. I really enjoyed the book. It's impossible to read it without being completely pulled into this world you've created. In some ways, I felt documented. It's a book that's brimming with texture and insight and pain and humanity. I was reminded of a Salman Rushdie line about why anyone should write it all. When I was reading it, the line is, Never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things, childhood, certainty, cities, doubts, dreams, instance, phrases, parents, loves, that go on slipping like sand through our fingers.
I was thinking of that. I felt while I was reading The Disappearers that you were furiously trying to do two things. And one was tell a gripping story, a frightening story, a powerful story. And the other was to keep hold of all these sorts of important remnants from the Jamaica you grew up in and to put them on the page.
Is that fair? Are those sort of the two aims in your mind or are they just sort of naturally entwined?

**Marlon James** (2:11)
I think they're entwined, but I also think I was doing some sort of deliberate record-keeping. I think I was responding against erasure, responding against, you know, it goes without saying that gay bashings have happened in Jamaica. They've happened everywhere. And I am always, always, you know, my guard always gets up when I feel history is being erased. Because my first question is to whose benefit? And, you know, and it's not just, I mean, there's a lot of atrocity in the book, but there's also triumph as well. And there's survival. And there's even fun. And there is humor. Because even though, you know, it's really a murder that sets this book in motion, well, the huge part of the book gets set in motion because of a murder, it is more about how people choose to live lives.
One way is to disappear. And there is all sorts of disappearances happening in that book. It's not just the two characters who vanish, you know, without a trace. And, you know, even though the sort of vanishing into yourself in order to survive or becoming anonymous and nobody picks on you.
And I want people to see that, that there is a lot of vanishing that to keep this society that we think we have intact, some people have to be going to give up their lives. And that doesn't necessarily mean die.

**Mythili Rao** (3:58)
You've said when you teach creative writing, this is a line that you had in a New York Times essay some years ago, that characters arise out of our need for them. And I wanted to talk about the two main narrators in the book. There are a lot of people whose voices are woven throughout this book. But Eddie Porteous and Jordan Brown are the two who carry most of the story.
So they meet in the play they're cast in, and then there's a violent incident where the cast of the play is attacked during a rehearsal. And in the aftermath, Eddie and Jordan are the ones who go about trying to find two of their fellow actors who go missing. They joke about it being kind of a Scooby-Doo mission, but it isn't that at all. They don't get along, they don't agree about how to go about the search. They take very different approaches to dealing with this atrocity and metabolizing it in some ways.
They're a bit of a foil to one another. And I wondered why this book needed both an Eddie and a Jordan to be kind of side by side in the main arc of the plot.