Twelve Bar Blues

Rating:
Summary: Contrived
Review: It is difficult to write outside of one's own idiom, and this book demonstrates this clearly. The so called African passages are entirely contrived - the names, the cultural references, the characters and the ceremonies are totally devoid of any depth of feeling and context. The other parts naturally flow from this. Clearly,the context is alien to the writer, and a lot of the dialogue and the descriptions for the African American/New Orleans experience border on being downright offensive. References to Jigs, bush negroes etc are out of context and culturally irrelevant. A compelling story, but perhaps readers would be better served by reading a biography of Louis Armstrong.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing and intricate storytelling
Review: Patrick Neate has created an absolute jem in "Twelve Bar Blues", a story spanning three continents and several generations of people. The best of the interwoven stories is that of Lick Holden, the forgotten jazz musician who has become more legend than anything, and his struggles with the tough Louisiana life, plus his development into a semi-famed musician.

Everything about this book is completely engrossing, and it ends up being quite the page-turner. The plot, the characters and the style really make this a winner. Neate is a brilliant story-teller, and "Twelve Bar Blues" is worthy of all its acclaim.

Rating:
Summary: "No story so important as the one you tells about yourself."
Review: This powerful novel of identity, both personal and cultural, spans several generations and moves through Africa, New Orleans, and New York, deftly integrating the personal sufferings of the characters with the music which sets them free--jazz. An African legend establishes at the beginning of the novel the complex interrelationships between music, love, sorrow, spells (be they from magic, dreams, drugs, or drink) and tragic fate. As later characters face the same complex of forces and fates in their own generations, "the American Negro experience" is dramatically revealed, along with the emotional release which comes with the birth of blues and jazz.

Telling the story of Lick Holden, "the greatest...horn man that was ever lost to history," Neate recreates the early days of New Orleans jazz in Storyville, with characters like Buddy Bolden, Fate Marable, Louis "Dipper" Armstrong, Kid Ory, and King Oliver. Whenever one of these legends performed, he "felt his music transcend his present...[and] he knew that he was more than a disempowered, dislocated, disrespected third generation slave." For Lick Holden, "the horn was his prayer voice and there was...God in his music."

Crafting the novel in the pattern of the twelve bar blues, described in the opening pages, Neate presents each half of the novel in twelve chapters, which move back and forth and around in time and location, from the early 1900's to the present, from Africa to New Orleans, New York, and Chicago. Lick's life story and his long love of Sylvie intertwines with the African legend at the beginning of the novel and with a present-day search by Sylvia DiNapoli, a black woman in her mid-forties, for her past. An additional contemporary setting in Africa, involving later generations of the characters from the opening legend, offers a counterpoint to Sylvia's search, and like a jazz motif, becomes part of it. The dominant themes of fate and choice, love and sorrow, dreams and tragedy, guilt and redemption weave through all the personal stories, as each generation expresses its soul in music--"which set [their] blackness free."

Powerfully drawn episodes, full of vitality and color, pulsate with the kind of detail which makes characters and locations simultaneously unique and universal. The "coincidences" at the conclusion are foreshadowed throughout, both by the twelve-bar pattern of the narrative development and by the repetitions in the lifestyles and choices of the characters. Soaring above the domestic tragedy of everyday life, this Whitbread Award winner is an imaginative and heartfelt story of every man's need to know where he comes from, who he is, and where he is going.

Rating:
Summary: fantastic
Review: While overseas, I picked this book up on a whim; I was pleasantly surprised. Neate is an excellent story-teller and and even better writer. I am surprised that it is not a best-seller back in the states...by far the best piece of fiction I have read in years.