Patrick Neate: Twelve Bar Blues

By GILBERT WONG

The title, as we are told, is also the most common harmonic progression in jazz. It comprises 12 bars based on a standard arrangement of the tonic, dominant and subdominant harmonies.

Neate translates the musical form into the structure of his novel, with the main plot and two engrossing sub-plots replacing the trio of harmonies. Musos will love the cute joke, and the genuine surprise is that it works. It gives a simple tale depth and a complexity of time and place that might go some way to explaining how this novel beat out Ian McEwan's Atonement for last year's Whitbread Prize.

It's easy to see why the judges might have been swayed, for Neate's book is wonderfully enjoyable, as opposed to the miserably clever fare that tends to win literary prizes.

The main story traces the history of the greatest unknown horn player to have lived, Lick Holden, a story that matches that of the real-life Buddy Bolden, in turn-of-the-century New Orleans. Lick is the clearest-hearted Negro in Cooltown, the precinct where jazz found its shape.

Neate offers up a history of the early days of jazz with Lick imparting some of his style to a young Louis Armstrong amid a colourful backdrop of quadroon balls, jick joints, crime, terrible poverty and sudden violence.

The two sub-plots follow the coffee-coloured Sylvia di Napoli, an elegant, retired, London prostitute and sometime jazz singer, in her search for a past buried in shame, and the trials of a Zambawi chief, Tongu, and his zakulu (witch doctor), Musa, who mystically inhabits a present continuous with a legendary past, which most often resembles an acid trip.

Neate's sub-plots link and digress and link again in the way of a jazz performance. Sometimes the structure seems more important than character.

More than a few of the dozens of people Neate introduces tend towards a cartoonish simplicity, though at the core, Lick, Sylvia and her young lover Jim hold our attention as three genuinely good people struggling to deal with the bad hands fate has dealt.

The big gamble is Neate's attempt to say something about the meaning of race when as one character says, "We're all out of Africa." He steps into the murky waters of historical and contemporary black identity with the sunny optimism of a tourist.

Judging by the photographs, Neates is a white guy. But that may be the point. If we learn anything from this novel it is that looks can so often deceive. Highly recommended.

Penguin

$34.95

* Gilbert Wong is an Auckland journalist.