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The effect, as some have said, is something like an African Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings – but there’s also a definite touch (for the videogame fan) of Witcher. My favourite is the entry for “The Mad Monkey”, which reads simply: “A deranged primate.” Jeepers, he must have had fun. “Amaki the Slippery: an elder nobody knows,” says another. “Asanbosam: monstrous eater of human flesh,” one entry tells us. Not to mention the Ghommids and the Zogbanu and the Omoluzu and the Bultungi, none of which you’d like to meet on a dark night – let alone in the “Blood Swamp” or “Darklands”. It is a world of Tokoloshes (naughty poltergeists) and Mingi (children with birth abnormalities traditionally shunned by tribes in southern Ethiopia), of Impundulus (lightning birds) and Sangomas (witches). The cast of characters – like many a fat fantasy epic, it has a four-page dramatis personae in the front – will give you a flavour. Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a great thick bubbling feijoada of African myth and folklore. James, then, is deeply interested in myth. When I interviewed James after his Man Booker win, I remember him grumbling (in a friendly enough way) that he tended to be asked a lot of not very interesting questions about Bob Marley, and that the best interviewer he’d had was someone who asked him about his devotion to Aeschylus. A Brief History was a series of tales told and retold, and the two figures at the heart of it had an archetypal force and grandeur to them: first Marley, who was only ever called “the Singer” and then “Josey Wales”, who himself had lifted a quasi-mythological pseudonym. Here’s a vast fantasy novel, revelling in the genre, set in a phantasmagorical version of ancient Africa. James, who won the 2016 Man Booker prize for the astounding A Brief History of Seven Killings – which circled in its polyphonic way around the 1976 assassination attempt against Bob Marley – has gone full Hobbit with Black Leopard, Red Wolf. You can expect a similar reaction to Marlon James’s new one. I wasn’t the only one to whisper anxiously: “Bloody hell.

Here was a literary novelist renowned for his feints and opacities, his dreamlike reimagining of the banalities and evasions and repressions of the English psyche, and here was… well, it was dreamlike all right, but it contained actual dragons, and actual ogres, and actual Sir Gawain, if you please. When Kazuo Ishiguro published The Buried Giant in 2015, it was to a certain amount of consternation.