Gary K. Wolfe Reviews Moon Witch, Spider King by Marlon James

Moon Witch, Spider King, Marlon James (Riv­erhead 978-0-735-22020-1, $30.00, 656pp, hc) February 2022.

The narrative trick of telling the same story from different viewpoints has yielded some genuine classics, from Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet to Kurosawa’s Rashomon, and it would seem especially well suited to fantasy epics – which too often tend to have far more characters and settings than actual plot lines. So when readers of Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf arrived at the very last page, when our notoriously unreliable narrator Tracker is speak­ing directly to the inquisitor who is presumably the interlocutor for the entire novel, they might reasonably guess that the next installment of the Dark Star trilogy would belong to Sogolon, the 177-year-old witch who is both collaborator and rival to Tracker. ‘‘I know you’ve heard her testi­mony,’’ he says, ‘‘So, what does mighty Sogolon say? Do not trust one word coming from Tracker’s mouth?’’ And volume two, Moon Witch, Spider King, does indeed turn out to be Sogolon’s story, but it’s a lot more than just her version of the quest for the mysterious missing boy that powers most of the plot of the first novel. In fact, Tracker and his companions – the Leopard, the giant Sandogo, the bounty hunter Ne Vampi – don’t even show up until some three-quarters of the way into the novel.

Until then, the novel focuses on the long and troubled life of Sogolon, almost taking on the aspect of a Dickensian life history. After her mother dies giving birth to her – before even giv­ing her a name – Sogolon faces repeated abuse by her three older brothers, who blame her for their mother’s death and even try to abandon her in the bush. She learns early on to be a street fighter and survivor, and eventually escapes to the brothel of Miss Azora, who trains her to be a Forbidden Lily, ‘‘for the man with peculiar needs.’’ From there she’s rescued by a socially ambitious noblewoman named Mistress Komwono in the city of Kongor. She begins to discover her own magical powers – mostly involving the ability to summon a powerful whirlwind which she comes to call ‘‘wind (not wind)’’ or ‘‘push’’ – when the master of the house attempts to rape her. Ironically, his death brings the family back into favor at court, and Sogolon moves to the capital city Fasisi, where she be­comes involved in various royal intrigues, meets some early allies and lovers, and first confronts the powerful chancellor Aesi, a demonic figure who will turn out to be her main supernatural antagonist for much of her life. Later, after being accused of theft, she finds herself banished to the stables, then exiled to a convent, sneaking out to become a skilled stickfighter under the name No Name Boy. After finally settling in with her lover Kele, she eventually gives birth and raises not only babies but lion cubs (being a shapeshifting lion is one of Kele’s little secrets, it turns out). She also manages to form crucial alliances in the royal family – and all this before she reaches her mid-20s. Following a break in her life story, we meet her again 136 years later, now known as the Moon Witch. Nsaka Ne Vampi, the bounty hunter who joined Tracker’s reluctant fellowship in the first novel, turns out to be Sogolon’s great-granddaughter.

Readers who might have been put off by the occasionally swaggering violence and the brutality of the protagonist in Black Leopard, Red Wolf might well find such a different sort of fantasy something of a relief, though Moon Witch, Spider King isn’t without its own episodes of violence (it turns out Sogolon has a knack for exploding people who get in her way). But the violence here seems more integral to the plot, less performa­tive, and more a function of Sogolon’s character; we understand the pain that leads to her powers. Many of the more effective apparitions from the first novel return, such as the ceiling-walking de­mons, in particular one called Red Ochre Boy. On the other hand, the political machinations of the royal court (complicated by a convoluted succes­sion law in which the king’s sister’s child inherits the throne) and the continual threats of war with the ‘‘mad kings’’ of the South never seem much more than marginal to Sologon’s own epic contest with the Aesi. Even the search for the missing boy comes as something of an appendage to Sogolon’s long life story (though we learn a good deal more about why the boy is so important and how tangled Sogolon already is in his history). Moon Witch, Spider King is simply a different sort of book from Black Leopard, Red Wolf, less involved in spectacle than in character, largely because Sogo­lon turns out to be a much fuller, more expansive character than Tracker ever was. Even her narrative voice tends toward a kind of gentle patois, with its streamlined verbs, as opposed to Tracker’s more straightforward syntax. Of course, we have some reason to question aspects of her reliability as well, but at the very least she convinces us that what Tracker saw as an epic adventure was only a sliver of the real story. Because of that, Moon Witch, Spider King feels like a more generous and inclusive novel than its predecessor, with much higher stakes and some very promising doorways for the third volume.

This review and more like it in the January 2022 issue of Locus.

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