Challenging but worth it: A Review of Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Tracker is a horny pathological liar who desperately needs therapy yesterday. When he goes on a suspicious quest to recover a mysterious missing child, what follows is trippy, shocking, and vulgar. (Also it's gay.)

Every other sentence in this book is layered with riddles, because Tracker likes to toy with you. His story is slippery. He's gleefully unreliable. He demands repeatedly that you rethink everything you believe as the narrative makes a habit of changing its own nature, mutating from revenge tale to quest to mystery to love story to political intrigue to fable, and back again, all of it framed as part of a prison interrogation.

I'd stay away if you dislike experimental and gratuitously violent works of literature that are patently uninterested in leaving you with any sense of catharsis, causing you wonder what the point of fiction even is. There are some really great individual lines in here, but when stitched together, the result is about as chaotic as it gets. It's like a puzzle box, and when you finally manage to crack it open, what you find inside is never the treasure you wanted or were expecting. Marlon James probably wanted to write something that was more provocative than it was entertaining or satisfying. I also think that in the time since this book came out, other fantasy authors have done something similar but better. Simon Jimenez's The Spear Cuts through Water comes to mind as a novel with obvious parallels.

However, though it's not going to be for everyone, Black Leopard, Red Wolf holds up, pushing the boundaries of literature and fantasy. I especially enjoyed the worldbuilding. It's goal is to draw on Western and Central African mythologies with the same fluency that J.R.R. Tolkien drew on Norse sagas, and it succeeds in creating a genuine cosmology. The Darklands -- a very surreal haunted forest -- and Dolingo -- a deeply disturbing city in which nothing can be trusted -- are probably two of the most memorable settings I've encountered.

While not a philosophical treatise or a novel of ideas, this book scratches a similar itch, assuming you have bandwidth to spend time unpacking everything, even if the story doesn't exactly reward patience, at least not in any traditional sense. (I basically had to read every chapter twice, and I'll probably go through everything again before I pick up the sequel.)