The number 7 has long held a special place in human culture and folklore. It is often referred to as a magical or lucky number. This significance can be seen in many different aspects of life, such as religion, mathematics, and even in popular culture. In religion, the number 7 is considered highly significant in many faiths. In Christianity, it is believed to be the number of completion and perfection, as God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. Many biblical stories also involve the number 7, such as the seven deadly sins and the seven virtues.
James was born in Kingston, Jamaica, to parents who were both in the Jamaican police: his mother (who gave him his first prose book, a collection of stories by O. Henry) became a detective and his father (from whom James took a love of Shakespeare and Coleridge) a lawyer. James is a 1991 graduate of the University of the West Indies, where he read Language and Literature. He received a master's degree in creative writing from Wilkes University (2006).
Part adventure tale, part chronicle of an indomitable woman who bows to no man, it is a fascinating novel that explores power, personality, and the places where they overlap. Both a brilliant narrative device seeing the story told in Black Leopard, Red Wolf from the perspective of an adversary and a woman as well as a fascinating battle between different versions of empire, Moon Witch, Spider King delves into Sogolon s world as she fights to tell her own story.
Many biblical stories also involve the number 7, such as the seven deadly sins and the seven virtues. In mathematics, 7 is known as a prime number, meaning it is only divisible by 1 and itself. This makes it a unique and special number in the world of numbers.
Moon Witch, Spider King by Marlon James review – the lion, the witch and the lost child
W hat do you write after winning the Booker prize? A fine problem to have, to be sure, yet the question of how to follow success – of whether to stick or twist, creatively speaking – hardly seems simple, at least to judge by the number of writers yet to publish another novel since winning.
Post-Booker paralysis hasn’t been an issue for the Jamaican novelist Marlon James, now more than 1,000 pages deep into an ongoing trilogy. After winning in 2015 with his third book, A Brief History of Seven Killings, about the attempted assassination of Bob Marley, he thought of writing a “quiet, literary” narrative about Jamaicans in New York; instead came 2019’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf, a gore-slathered fantasy epic in a mythical ancient Africa of warring kingdoms, roamed by a ragtag band of superpower-boosted antiheroes, including a 300-year-old witch, Sogolon, hunting down a swarm of child-murdering demons.
A gruelling, invigorating reading experience rife with contradictions, it widened the horizons of swords-and-sorcery narratives while presenting a lurid vision of Africa to rival anything in the imperialist make-believe of H Rider Haggard. It was hard not to wonder if the fluid sexuality of the central characters, combined with the story’s late-arriving anti-patriarchal thrust, somehow served to green light the excesses of its expletive-laden, groin-fixated splatterfest. Hard not to suspect, too, that the relentless chopping-and-fucking emphasis served as counterweight to a literary artist’s anxiety about writing a book whose ambitions lay not only in decolonising the fantasy genre but also in recapturing the heady rush of devouring Star Wars novelisations and X-Men comics in his youth.
Like its predecessor, this is a long book, scaled to satisfy the genre’s typically pig-out portions
Moon Witch, Spider King, the second instalment, dials down, just a touch, the gut-clenching grotesquerie that characterised the first book. For the most part, it’s an origin story fleshing out Sogolon’s emotional stake in the search for a dead child with which the earlier book began. The action unfolds as a kind of nomadic picaresque centred on her flight from her downtrodden girlhood, in which salvation repeatedly heralds a new form of captivity, whether she’s on the run from her abusive brothers or the royal court where, as a servant, she gets a backstairs view of a succession drama she unwittingly fuels thanks to her lethal telekinetic ability to blow people up from inside, used inadvertently to fend off the predatory head of the household she’s taken into after escaping a brothel.
Like its predecessor, this is a long book, scaled to satisfy the genre’s typically pig-out portions, yet with an uncompromising prose style that shuns easy-reading propulsion. Despite the unglossed vocabulary, the novel’s diction tends to be relatively straightforward: in a childbirth scene, for instance, we read that “everything is wet wet wet and red red red” (typically, we’re also shown “the afterbirth in the corner luring flies”). The difficulty lies more in the book’s enviable confidence that we’ll be able to grasp, say, who’s speaking without the narrative making it crystal-clear, or James’s relaxed attitude to (for example) using three different names for the same character in a single paragraph.
The result is that a chronic fog, strobe-lit by regular flashes of sex and violence, overlays the big picture weirdness, tricky enough in itself to keep track of, with dreams and occasional interludes in an airborne city mixing with a ground-floor reality that isn’t exactly humdrum, to say the least. In that childbirth scene – a mid-book swerve into domestic marital drama – Sogolon gives birth to “lion cubs”, and she’s not talking figuratively; as she points out, in this world “a shape shifter is nothing strange. and anyway my middle brother used to fuck a snake”.
In short, there’s a huge amount going on, and yet the novel’s habit of never staying any place long, combined with its studied indeterminacy about what’s actually happening – Sogolon might be 170 years old, not 300, and isn’t, it turns out, even called Sogolon – serves as an extreme test of stamina. Repeated boss-level clashes with a memory-wiping demigod, the Aesi, don’t come clearly enough into definition to generate real suspense, and despite a lengthy dramatis personae, the book’s only substantial relationship involves Keme, the half-lion father of Sogolon’s aforementioned cubs. By far the most impactful scene involves the frenzied bouts of coupling that ensue after one of their brood is felled in a raid by demons; when Keme wildly beckons a surviving child to come and watch him and Sogolon in the act of making another sibling, it’s a troublingly strange moment with an authentic psychological frisson, rare in a novel intent on baser thrills.
All the same, anyone who stays the course through all this probably won’t want to miss the final instalment to come: a swerve into horror, apparently. On the basis of what’s already been published, that ought to make us shudder in more ways than one – perhaps with a tinge of anticipation, too, for that peaceful novel about Jamaicans in New York.
Moon Witch, Spider King by Marlon James is published by Hamish Hamilton (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
An Instant New York Times Bestseller and NPR Best Book of 2022 pick
From Marlon James, author of the bestselling National Book Award finalist Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the second book in the Dark Star trilogy.
It also holds a prominent position in the decimal system, as there are seven digits from 0 to 6. The magical and lucky connotations associated with the number 7 can be seen in popular culture as well. Many superstitions and rituals involve the number, such as throwing a coin into a fountain and making a wish, or blowing out all the candles on a birthday cake in one breath. In literature and movies, the number 7 is often used to convey a sense of mystery and enchantment, such as in the fairy tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Overall, the number 7 has come to represent many different things to different people. Whether it is seen as a symbol of completion, a prime number in mathematics, or a lucky charm, there is no denying the magical allure that this number holds in human culture..
Reviews for "Exploring the Impact of Injuries on the NJ Devils' Magic Number"
- John - 2/5 stars - "I really didn't enjoy 'Nj devikls magic nmuber'. The plot was confusing and hard to follow. The characters were also quite underdeveloped and I didn't feel invested in their stories. Overall, I found the book to be dull and uninteresting."
- Sarah - 1/5 stars - "I was really disappointed with 'Nj devikls magic nmuber'. The writing style was disjointed and difficult to read. I also found numerous typos and grammatical errors throughout the book, which made it even harder to enjoy. The story itself lacked depth and failed to engage me as a reader. I would not recommend this book."
- David - 2/5 stars - "Unfortunately, 'Nj devikls magic nmuber' didn't live up to my expectations. The pacing was incredibly slow and there were several unnecessary subplots that didn't add much to the overall story. The ending felt rushed and unsatisfying. I was hoping for a captivating and magical read, but I was left feeling bored and unimpressed."
- Emily - 2/5 stars - "'Nj devikls magic nmuber' was not my cup of tea. The characters felt cliché and one-dimensional, and the dialogue was often cringe-worthy. The plot felt predictable and lacked originality. I struggled to stay engaged and found myself losing interest halfway through the book. It just didn't resonate with me."