In the epigraph to his sprawling, cacophonous, ambitious and often brilliant Booker prize-winning novel Marlon James quotes a Jamaican proverb that warns: "If it no go so, it go near so." South African readers can relate to this in an age when the seemingly impossible headlines are all too often just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to stories of political corruption and back-room dealings.At just under 700 pages, with a cast of almost 80 characters and using the musical patois of Jamaica, James's book A Brief History of Seven Killings is neither brief nor easy to read, but once you get your head around the various players and historical incidents it sucks you in and grips you in its grim, super-violent and chaotic view of the underbelly of the island's history.Divided into five sections covering the years from 1976 to 1991, the book is loosely focused around the assassination attempt on Bob Marley in December 1976 when gunmen stormed his house and opened fire on the reggae legend, his wife, Rita, and manager, all of whom survived. The gunmen were never brought to book and James imagines them as a motley crew of youngsters and ghetto gangsters led by the enigmatic and malevolent figure of Josey Wales, a gun-toting, cocaine-dealing member of the Storm Posse out of the fictional neighbourhood of Copenhagen City in the city's slums.The year 1976 is rightly remembered as one of the most violent in the island's history as gangs armed themselves and went on the rampage in support of the two main political parties - the socialist Cuba-aligned People's National Party and the conservative Jamaica Labour Party. Add to this CIA meddling, as part of the US's Cold War policy, and the rise of the Medellin cartel in Columbia and you have the recipe for a James Ellroy, Don DeLillo, Robert Stone-infused gutter-up, paranoia-tinged view of history that James uses to deftly interweave his many narrative threads that stretch all the way to New York in the 1980s and early-1990s. The ripple effects of the devil's pact between politicians and gangsters were felt in Jamaica as recently as 2010 when confrontations between the Shower Posse cocaine cartel and soldiers and police left 73 people dead.In 1976, in an effort to address the violence, Marley organised a peace concert and it was while rehearsing for this gig that he was shot. He still went on to play the concert and then left Jamaica for self-imposed exile in London, returning two years later to play another peace concert at which he famously called PNP leader Michael Manley and JLP boss Edward Seaga onto the stage in a show of unity that ushered in a brief period of calm.Referred to in the book only as the Singer, Marley is never given his own voice but rather becomes the object of reflection of the characters James creates around him as he imagines the deaths of his seven gunmen in the wake of the botched assassination. After Marley's death from cancer in 1981, the narrative stumbles for a few pages before majestically finding its feet in the exploration of the rise of the Jamaican cartels in the US during the crack wars of the 1980s. Here the character of Nina Burgess comes into her own. A middle-class Kingston girl who has a one-night stand with the Singer believes it to be the beginning of something only to find herself in the wrong place at the wrong time and then fleeing Kingston in an ever-increasing attempt to rid herself of all things Jamaica. She is James's means for exploring complicated issues of identity and the rise of the Diaspora during the early days of globalisation.Sprawling, vibrant and earning its author comparisons with everyone from William Faulkner to James Joyce, Quentin Tarantino and David Foster Wallace, A Brief History of Seven Killings is my book of the year and one that gives you faith in the power of literature to take history and spin it into something that recreates lived experience in a way that only a novel really can. If it no go so, great storytelling can make it go so. You'll read it once to figure out what the hell is going on, twice for its awesome prose and style and a third time for the sheer pleasure of floating in its all-encompassing bravado.A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James, Oneworld, R230..