Marlon James - File

At the beginning of the fourth segment of Monday evening's extensive reading (without revealing too much of the entire book) at Bookophilia from his secondpublished novel, The Book of Night Women, Marlon James referred to a prior reading.

"At Calabash, I read something that ran afoul of all the goodly mothers of Jamaica. I have decided I love scandal. I'll read it again," James said.

There were, apparently, none of said 'goodly mothers' (or with children in tow) at 92 Hope Road on Monday night. So the attentive silence with occasional guffaw as slave women Lilith and Homer discussed relationships and race explicitly and their 'spicing' of maasa's pot with faeces and urine contrasted with the protest by some members of the audience at Jake's, Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth, in late May.

great turnout

At the beginning, as what turned out to be a standing-room-only audience in the small space filled out, the evening's host Clement Hamilton spoke with James briefly about his previous novel, John Crow's Devil, as well as The Book of Night Women. James said the latter and later is a novel about women and it is written in patois, save for where the white people speak.

And before starting the first excerpt, James further explained that it is set between 1785 and 1801 and is about "a group of slave women who conspire to set off the greatest rebellion in Jamaican history".

James said that he had two pre-reading synopses: for the white audience The Book of Night Women is summed up as "a story about forbidden love between a slave and an overseer". For the black audience it is described as "about some black women who get sick and tired of slavery and decide to burn down a third of Jamaica and kill every white man within 100 miles".

attentive audience

And the reading, in which James engaged his very attentive audience, began with Lilith's birth ("Two black legs spread and a black mother screaming") at Montpelier; continued with her transfer to another estate (where the first Standard English came up in Monday night's reading and meeting the beautiful, irreverent Dulcimena ("Anyway, God know bes' or God don' know a rat!") In one passage, Lilith sees Dulcimena being penetrated by the same white man who had whipped her previously, the slave women faking pleasure while looking directly at Lilith.

And the reading ended with Lilith drowning him in his bath. While she is pushing him under and he is struggling ("Lilith never see a white man look so frighten") and, after he died, under the water he was "looking at her with black man fear on him face".

In the post-reading interaction, James spoke to some of the process of writing and getting The Book of Night Women published. He said that he had had no problem with the patois in America; "it is always the British and Jamaicans".

James said that he had wanted to write a serious novel in patois because "I thought it could carry it. It is an experiment that could have fallen flat on its face".

And James' next novel is far removed from his previous two, as "it is set in the 1930s in Europe, nobody is from the Caribbean".

"I like ridiculous challenges where I am likely to fall flat on my face," James said. However, that book "will not happen for a while".