I was listening to Q on CBC late one night as Natasha and I often do while getting ready for bed, and there was a panel of people (who I thought were “Canada Reads” panelists) discussing books. One panelist, with only a few seconds to pitch “The Book of Night Women” by James Marlon, described it as “A book about Jamaican slave women who form a secret society to foment a revolution. There’s lots of intrigue and darkness and violence.” Which sounded like something I normally would never read, so I immediately gravitated towards it.

It turns out that I was hallucinating or something, because after I bought the book I couldn’t find any record of who said that, it’s -not- part of Canada Reads, and in fact there was no literature panel on Q the week I believe I heard it. I think dark Obeah magic made me buy it and read it. Which is fantastic, because it’s an excellent story.

I won’t go into much further detail about the plot, because that one line will hopefully grab you as it grabbed me. But there are two really important observations I want to make about this book:

1) The book is narrated in a really thick but setting-appropriate Jamaican Patois. The first few chapters I thought my brain was going to melt out of my head, working harder to interpret than understand. Towards the midway point I was reading it pretty fluently, but expect to slog slowly through all the “Lawd, pickney, de cow cain’t milk sheself!“. It adds a fantastic depth and richness to the story, but it’s hard to read. Language-wise it may also be interesting to note that they drop the N-bomb every second sentence, which is used entirely in proper context, but still made me squeamish.

2) The life of a slave, as presented in this book, is every bit (and more) tragic, merciless, debasing and brutal as you can imagine. I expected it to be pretty bleak, but the author goes to great lengths to expose you to cruelty, torture and savagery. It’s not for the faint of heart. The more terribly they’re abused, though, the more savoury their plan for revenge becomes. I don’t know: were all plantation owners insanely violent short-tempered sociopaths? This guy’s really a piece of work.

Really happy that I picked this book up – it’s a real page-turner, and it’s given me a lot of insight into a setting I knew very little about, and inspired me to follow up with some research into the real-life history of the period.