This book is an exploration of recent Jamaican political history. It takes as its focal point a real event, the mysterious attempted assassination of Bob Marley in the 70s, and imagines a backstory involving gangs, drugs, and the CIA. Somehow John-John Kennedy shows up. It’s an impossibly dull slog of a read, north of 700 pages, with well more stream of consciousness than anyone should have to bear. There are thirty or forty characters too many. There’s nothing remotely musical about the prose, and that’s a hard trick to pull off, but after all the word Singer appears several thousand times. All of the characters, without exception, are annoying and nasty and all-around unpleasant. At one point Josey Wales sounds like he might have something interesting to say, but even that glimmer of enjoyment only lasts 5 pages or so. I picked up this book because it won a Booker Prize, but I think the criteria that year was something like “immensely unpleasant to read and also you get extra points for more characters.” It’s cool to learn a few things about Jamaican history but otherwise it was a total waste of time.