Marlon James’ debut novel John Crow’s Devil begins at the end of the story, in the aftermath of an undisclosed slaughter in the Jamaican village of Gibbeah. The villagers have recently surrounded themselves with a fence, because “Every city of righteousness had a wall,” and as James leads the reader from that peripheral barrier deep into the public and personal histories of the village, he unwinds a tale of power at its most brutal and petty. The story is one of religious struggle between two men of the church and two women who, for reasons of their own, attach themselves to these opposing clergy, but it is also an indictment of oppression and the ease with which it creeps into a place. John Crow’s Devil engages the political legacy of Frantz Fanon without sacrificing the power of fiction.

Retreating from the bloody streets of its opening pages into the past, the novel follows a heightening feud between Pastor Bligh--the Rum Preacher--and the fire and brimstone Apostle York, come to depose his drunkard predecessor and bring religious order to Gibbeah. Cast from his own church, the Rum Preacher is taken in by the Widow Greenfield, while her lifelong rival, Lucinda, falls at the feet of the Apostle. Once nursed to sobriety, Pastor Bligh challenges the Apostle for his lost congregation, as the Widow and Lucinda replay a rivalry as old as their contentious schooldays. Around them, the citizens of Gibbeah fall into the grip of the Apostle, raining violence upon sinning neighbors, attacking trespassing outsiders, and sealing themselves off from the world. The escalation of violence and its brutal conclusion seem inevitable once Apostle York sets events in motion, but even amidst that brutality we never lose sympathy for James’ characters, or our sense of their fragility, which makes the suffering they bear and bring to bear all the more moving.

Gibbeah’s fence, a barrier of both protection and isolation, stands at the edge of the village but at the heart of the novel. These characters are burdened by vices, from drinking to secret witchcraft, and they struggle to contain their urges just as the Apostle drives them to barricade their borders. This struggle for control over others and self becomes electric in James’ prose, particularly when third person narration gives way to vernacular accounts at the novel’s tensest moments:

Lawd a massy, you should a see it when all Hell break loose in the church!
Then pop story give we.
All we see is this man. First we think say is Devil. Then we think is
Gabriel or Michael or one of them strong angel.
Tell we bout the Hell that break loose.

These voices, like the village, are ready to burst with the pent up rage of the powerless, and all it takes to set them loose is Apostle York fingering one target after another.

Though the battle in Gibbeah is a spiritual one, the characters and their conflicts remain grounded in the physical world, a connection reinforced by passages of vivid description:

The mighty man of God made one mighty step onto the Widow’s lawn and fell, first on his knees, then on his face, and his eyes went white. The ground shook like Jericho. The whip flew out of his hand and landed in the road like a dead snake. Men and women scattered, some screaming. From Brother Vixton’s eyes, nose, ears, and mouth sprang black blood.

While the graphic violence and sexual cruelty this earthiness entails are disturbing at times, they tie the novel’s ethereal elements to reality, never ignoring the painful impacts power struggles have on actual lives. Through bloodshed and disease, characters’ bodies are bound to thematic and political questions, making for not only a more powerful read, but a bolder cultural statement--this is not art for art’s sake, but art for the sake of life. There’s a temptation is to compare John Crow’s Devil to novels by Toni Morrison or Earl Lovelace, among others, and there are certainly similarities to those works in this one. There is even an echo of Faulkner in the meticulous, multi-vocal rendering of conflicts entrenched in village life. But more important than any comparison is that James’ debut is very much its own book, and stands as tall on its own as it would with any other volume beside it.