The story is structured nonlinearly, with Tracker telling an inquisitor what happened on the quest, and why the boy he sought was now dead. All of the press I've read on this book suggests that the other two books that have yet to be written will detail the same story from different points of view.
The good
I preordered "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" in January on Audible and listened to it in audiobook format. The guy who reads the book, Dion Graham, is a supremely talented reader. I could recommend this book on his talent alone, but I cannot recommend this book for any of its other components.
As someone who majored in English in college, and as someone who reads A LOT, I understand the literary merits of this book. The prose is almost stream-of-consciousness. The African mythology is pretty cool. The story is altogether solid, but ultimately, it's not about a whole lot. The experience of listening to this book was a dream-like jostling through fights and travels and stories on top of other stories.
The bad
Early on, "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" was touted as an "African Game of Thrones." Then, after all of the pre-release hype died down and books were sold, the author came out in subsequent interviews saying that comparison had been a joke.
The language, the time jumping and the literary elements point to this book being for an advanced niche reading audience. Aside from a thin storyline about a debate over a young boy being the rightful king, "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" has very little to do with "Game of Thrones." If you're looking for "African Game of Thrones" in this, you're not going to find it.
The ugly
"Black Leopard, Red Wolf" has its merits, but it is all overshadowed by an oozing, crusty scab of graphic violence. This book has everything you need to make you cringe and clutch your pearls: rape, gang rape, torture, pedophilia, bestiality, graphic murder, mutilation and incest. If you are not utterly put off by all of those things, you're in for a liberal sprinkling of casual and overt misogyny, racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. There are orgies, physical and emotional abuse and graphic sex scenes. I don't know that this book should have been advertised to such a vast audience in the way that it was, when it's clearly a tough book to get through.
James himself has spoken about how he writes violence in The Guardian:
One thing the new novel shares with its predecessors is a uniquely intense presentation of violence. I ask him whether he ever feels that his work strays close to gratuitousness, to a kind of willful lingering over scenes of pain.
“You have to risk it or you won’t get close to the power or the horror of it,” he says. “You have to risk going too far. Man, I sound like Foucault. I actually think this kind of antiseptic, clipped, edited version of violence I see in literature sells it short. If you don’t read the scene of the murder of a child and find it unbearable, then that scene failed. I think people are used to violence, but they’re not used to suffering. In Hollywood films, we see violence, but we don’t see suffering. In my writing of violence I do not escape suffering and I think one of my violent scenes is equivalent to 30 of someone else’s. I get this rap of being too violent, but actually what I’m saying is that violence comes with consequences and suffering and I don’t blink at either. So it’s going to reverberate longer in my books.”
I would argue that the book's violence doesn't just stray close to gratuitousness, it is gratuitous. "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" was A LOT for me, someone who can tolerate violent content fairly well. It's the most disturbing book I've ever read. If you're sensitive to such things, I'm warning you away from them right now.
The way this book was marketed is much different from what it actually it is. I would not recommend reading it.
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