Black Leopard, Red Wolf

The World

James has described his project as building an African equivalent of Tolkien’s Middle-earth — a fully realised secondary world with its own geography, political structures, magical systems, and history. The comparison is useful as an indication of ambition, but it obscures the fundamental difference in method. Tolkien built his world from Northern European mythology, Old English, Norse saga, and Celtic tradition. James builds his from the oral traditions of West and Central Africa, from Yoruba and Fon mythology, from the historical realities of pre-colonial African kingdoms, from a research project that extended across years and encompassed sources that the Western literary tradition has largely ignored.

The result is a world that feels genuinely foreign to readers formed by European fantasy. The magic does not work by familiar rules. The social structures — the relations between kingdoms, the role of griots and diviners, the nature of spiritual power — are organised along different principles. The creatures — the Adze, the Sasabonsam, the Ogo — come from African folklore rather than the bestiary of European myth. Even the relationship between the living and the dead, which is a foundational element of any fantasy world’s architecture, operates differently here: the dead are present, vocal, and not clearly distinguished from the living by the rules James establishes.

This unfamiliarity is deliberate and is the novel’s central argument. James is not merely providing diverse representation within an otherwise conventional fantasy template. He is demonstrating that the template itself is a cultural construction — that what we think of as the “rules” of epic fantasy are the rules of European epic fantasy, and that building from different materials produces a different kind of story with a different kind of moral logic.

Tracker

Tracker is introduced via the thing that makes him distinctive: he has a nose of preternatural sensitivity that can follow a specific person’s scent across time and distance. He is hired by a group of parties with competing interests to find a missing boy, and he assembles — or falls into — a hunting company that includes the Leopard, a shapeshifter who can move between human and leopard form, and whose relationship with Tracker is one of the novel’s central emotional threads.

The quest structure is familiar enough from Western epic fantasy — a group of unlikely companions assembled to pursue a specific goal across a dangerous landscape — but James deploys it with constant awareness of the conventions he is invoking and departing from. The companions are not a fellowship united by shared purpose; they have conflicting loyalties and hidden agendas. The goal — finding the boy — becomes increasingly unclear as the novel proceeds and the question of who wants the boy found and why becomes more complicated than it initially appeared. And the hero is not heroic in any conventional sense: Tracker is violent, self-interested, sexually active with both men and women, and frequently wrong in his assessments of the situations he finds himself in.

The Leopard is the relationship that gives the novel its emotional centre. The connection between Tracker and the Leopard — hostile, intimate, competitive, and finally something that resists easy categorisation — is one of the few relationships in the novel that is not primarily instrumental, and James writes it with a warmth that provides relief in a narrative that is otherwise quite relentless in its violence and uncertainty.

The Frame and the Difficulty

The novel is told in the form of an interrogation: Tracker, imprisoned for reasons that are not immediately clear, is recounting the story of the quest to a scribe employed by an Inquisitor who wants to understand what happened to the boy. This frame matters in several ways. It means that everything we read is Tracker’s account — already retrospective, already shaped by what Tracker knows about how the story ends, and filtered through a narrator who has established reasons not to tell the full truth to the authorities interrogating him. We cannot trust what Tracker tells us, and James does not want us to.

The novel’s graphic violence and explicit sexuality have been discussed extensively since publication, largely by readers who found them excessive. James’s position — that both are purposeful, that the violence reflects the actual texture of the world he is building, and that the sexuality is inseparable from Tracker’s identity and the novel’s rejection of the implicit heteronormativity of most epic fantasy — is persuasive, though whether the execution always matches the intention is a question readers will answer differently.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf is the first of three volumes, each of which will recount the same events from a different narrator’s perspective. The second volume, Moon Witch, Spider King, told from the perspective of a female character named Sogolon, was published in 2022 and offers a substantially different account of the same events — in some places directly contradicting Tracker’s version. James is building a structure in which multiple unreliable accounts circle the same events without any of them being definitively correct, a form that mirrors the oral tradition’s relationship to historical truth: not a single authoritative account but a living argument among competing versions.

Our rating: 3.9/5 — Dazzling in its world-building and formal ambition, demanding in ways that will defeat some readers and reward others — unlike anything else in contemporary fantasy, for better and occasionally for worse.