In “Chain-Gang All-Stars”, prisoners are turned into gladiators
image: Celina PereiraChain-Gang All-Stars. By Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Pantheon; 384 pages; $27. Harvill Secker; £18.99PRISONERS ON DEATH row are sorted into teams, tattooed with corporate logos and coerced into participating in “hard action-sports”—a sanitised term for mortal combat. Bloodthirsty spectators watch from the stands of purpose-built arenas and on television screens around the world. Fighters who survive three years of battle are allowed to walk free. “Chain-Gang All-Stars” is a rowdy send-up of reality television and racial injustice in the penal system. This is the debut novel by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (pictured), though “Friday Black”, a collection of satirical short stories about violence and racism in American society, won acclaim in 2018. At the centre of this book are Loretta and Hamara, two black female prisoners each nearing three years in the arena. They are lovers as well as contestants—or “Links”—in the same team (“Chain”). Viewers are fascinated by their re
Chain-Gang All-Stars. By Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Pantheon; 384 pages; $27. Harvill Secker; £18.99
PRISONERS ON DEATH row are sorted into teams, tattooed with corporate logos and coerced into participating in “hard action-sports”—a sanitised term for mortal combat. Bloodthirsty spectators watch from the stands of purpose-built arenas and on television screens around the world. Fighters who survive three years of battle are allowed to walk free.
“Chain-Gang All-Stars” is a rowdy send-up of reality television and racial injustice in the penal system. This is the debut novel by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (pictured), though “Friday Black”, a collection of satirical short stories about violence and racism in American society, won acclaim in 2018. At the centre of this book are Loretta and Hamara, two black female prisoners each nearing three years in the arena. They are lovers as well as contestants—or “Links”—in the same team (“Chain”). Viewers are fascinated by their relationship, which is captured by the camera drones that relentlessly follow the couple. In a bid to further boost ratings, entertainment chiefs contrive to make them fight each other to the death.
At least since George Orwell’s “1984”, the nightmarish realms of dystopian fiction have been viewed through the eyes of a single protagonist. The narration of “Chain-Gang All Stars”, unlike in novels such as “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “The Hunger Games”, is panoramic, concerned less with individuals than the futuristic world they occupy. As it toggles back and forth between various points of view—from fighters to viewers, television executives to outraged civil-rights campaigners—the back stories of the contestants focus the reader’s attention on questions of crime and punishment. One particularly feared combatant, a rapist shown to be mentally unstable, is competing only to escape his abuse at the hands of a prison officer.
As a result, “Chain-Gang All Stars” trades depth and drama for scale and critique. The force of the novel lies less in the doomed romance between its central characters than in the sober footnotes that draw attention to the disproportionate number of black people currently in American prisons and the frequency of their fatal encounters with police.
Among others, the annotations tell the true story of Tina Davis, a mother in New York state who died after being tasered in 2020. Like any dystopian author, Mr Adjei-Brenyah compels the reader to look beyond the page, blurring the lines between modern America and the hellscape he so energetically imagines. ■
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