Marley, who is referred to only as the Singer throughout the book, serves as a somewhat paradoxical mythic force: He is the peace-preaching voice of the disenfranchised and at the same time the symbol of complicity with what the Rastafarians call “Babylon,” the corrupt system of power that includes politically motivated violence, American influence, and police brutality. In the novel, the assassination inspires a dizzying epic, which encompasses Jamaican politics and American Cold-War policy, not to mention poverty, gang warfare, race, class, and international trade in crack cocaine. In real life, Marley survived and the almost-killers’ motivations and identities sparked conspiracy theories. The 1976 attempt to assassinate Bob Marley serves as the book’s anchor, but to label A Brief History of Seven Killings a historical novel would be to miss its genre-blurring essence.
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