The Book of Night Women is a sweeping, startling novel, a true tour de force of both voice and storytelling. It is the story of Lilith, born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the eighteenth century. Even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they—and she—will come to both revere and fear. The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been plotting a slave revolt, and as Lilith comes of age and reveals the extent of her power, they see her as the key to their plans. But when she begins to understand her own feelings and desires and identity, Lilith starts to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman in Jamaica, and risks becoming the conspiracy’s weak link. Lilith’s story overflows with high drama and heartbreak, and life on the plantation is rife with dangerous secrets, unspoken jealousies, inhuman violence, and very human emotion—between slave and master, between slave and overseer, and among the slaves themselves. Lilith finds herself at the heart of it all. And all of it told in one of the boldest literary voices to grace the page recently—and the secret of that voice is one of the book’s most intriguing mysteries.
eMusic Review 0
02.24.09
Marlon James, The Book of Night Women
2009 | Label: Penguin Audio
A mysterious revolt is brewing at an 18th-century plantation in this haunting epic
Near the tail end of the 18th century on a sugar plantation in Jamaica, a lone baby is brought into that faraway island world. She is named Lilith, and her empowering, biblical name is an appropriate metaphor for the passions she will stir and the troubles that will ensue in Marlon James' outstanding new novel. As recounted by a mysterious narrator in rhythmic, haunting Afro-Caribbean dialect, Lilith's story begins with awed fear at what she represents to her fellow kin in slavery, The Night Women, whose stealth plans for revolt against their white overlords teeter on the brink of success or ruin and come to depend on Lilith's dangerous beauty and developing force of will. But the young woman has a mind and plans of her own, looking past the ulterior motivations of her elders and the racism of the plantation masters to find that her world is shaded gray, with powerful taskmasters displaying vulnerabilities that have her questioning the absolute judgment of the Night Women. Robin Miles' audio rendition, delivered in deep, dulcet tones, highlights James' carefully calibrated rhythmic cadence and deepens his examination of the ingrained racial tensions that require a century to abolish and another to overcome.
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