The Marvellous Equations of the Dread: A Novel in Bass Riddim [Paperback]

Is meBob. Bob Marley. Reincarnated as homeless Fall-down man, Bob Marley sleeps in a clock tower built on the site of a lynching in Half Way Tree, Kingston. The ghosts of Marcus Garvey and King Edward VII are there too, drinking whiskey and playing solitaire. No one sees that Fall-down is Bob Marley, no one but his long-ago love, the deaf woman, Leenah, and, in the way of this otherworldly book, when Bob steps into the street each day, five years have passed. Jah ways are mysterious ways, from Kingstons ghettoesto London, from Haile Selaisses Ethiopian palace and back to Jamaica, Marcia Douglass mythical reworking of three hundred years of violence is a ticket to the deep world of Rasta history. This amazing novelin bass riddimcarries the reader on a voyage all the way to the gates of Zion.A lyrical convocation of reggae, roots healing, the history of Half Way Tree, of duppies and fearsome body-swapping, of dangerous youthmen and deliberate revolutionhere is prose steeped deep in portents, parables, and a profusion of signs. Marcia Douglas lets the sounds fall from on high, in prose that chants down Babylon and confirms the coming, sweeter than can be reckoned, of Zion.Marcia Douglass book is as marvellous as its title  one of the most stunning new works of Jamaican fiction I have had the pleasure of reading. The novel that is not unlike the island that it tries to capture  as musical as it is brutal, and here is writing as full of poetic heft as it is of narrative drive; even as you want to linger and relish in the language, the novel demands that you turn the page.The spirit of Bob Marley dominates this novel, which evokes the rich, bottom-heavy sounds of Marley's music. You can't tell the living and the dead here without a score card, and a score card would be too linear... Think of this book as a haunted island with spectral voices and inscrutable mysteries.TheMind-blowing.Rhapsodic, poetic, scripturally engaged and endlessly inventive. Notls~