Twelve Bar Blues – Patrick Neate

When a young princess falls in love with a peasant boy because of his beautiful singing voice her father is not pleased. And neither is the boy’s friend, the son of the village witch doctor. A few magic spells later and the boy is whisked off to slavery in the Americas, leaving the witch doctor’s son to take his place. But the girl, broken hearted, and wearing a headdress decorated with sea shells, dies by the side of a lake.

The rest of Twelve Bar Blues follows the unravelling of this act of betrayal down the generations and across the world.

Patrick Neate won the Whitbread Prize for Twelve Bar Blues, which begins with this fairy tale about a princess, set in an African village in the mists of time, and takes in London New York and New Orleans before returning to the same village by jumbo jet.

It is a novel full of wit, humour and crazy characters. There is Lick Holden, the greatest jazz cornet player never known. When he is incarcerated for a childhood misdemeanour we discover that the warden runs the prison during the day, but at night the law of the jungle applies. It is a terrifying time for Lick, though the horrific and violent descriptions of clandestine bullying have an element of comedy that distances the reader from its cruelty. Lick finds his way to the prison band and impresses the bandmaster with his ability to blow the cornet with both his chops and his head. Playing at his mother’s funeral he unleashes his heart, and further trauma means there is more to come.

We watch Lick in Cooltown, Louisiana in 1908, then in Storyville, New Orleans where he teaches Louis Armstrong the hot new style. There are hookers, speakeasies and violent dives. Back in Africa a new village chief falls in love with a woman with ears like a monkey because he loves the jazz she plays on the hi-fi. He is living in a concrete hut, and worrying about his manhood when Corissa Pink, a black archaeologist from Detroit turns up with an African headdress that she found in the bed of a nearby lake. The seashells used as decoration intrigue her as Zambawi is many miles from the coast.

Back in London, Sylvia, a prostitute with Italian and African blood, leaves for New York to investigate her roots. The drunken English youth she meets on the plane may well be a cipher for the author of this story. He is one of the few white characters in the novel, and almost the only one portrayed in a favourable light. Together they search for Sylvia’s family in New York and Chicago. The people we meet during their travels are grotesque or amusing caricatures, and include a black evangelist driving a limousine and a seedy, slum dwelling eighty year old Italian uncle waiting for a prostitute to arrive and give him a blow job.

In Chicago they meet a wayward African witch doctor who is the reincarnation of the man who cast such a vicious spell in the opening chapter. His attempt to draw the story to its conclusion by making good his ancestor’s guilty deed takes us to the end of Twelve Bar Blues.

This was a great novel in so many ways. I loved the crazy characters, the wild and varied settings, and the way the plot seamlessly drew together such different times, locations and events. The African chief living in a concrete hut is perfectly drawn picture of a man in a middle age crisis. In him and other characters the author shows us human frailty, but there are depths of love and companionship that provide both optimism and humour.

I wonder how this novel – published in 2002 – would be accepted now, in a time when I have heard people claim only disabled actors can play the part of Richard 3rd, and only black men can play Othello? Cultural appropriation is defined as the exploitation of cultural traditions for profit: for example Exeter Chiefs rugby team using an Indian headdress and name as a slogan or logo. Neate is a white man who makes us laugh at black people by exploiting stereotypical representations of them, their ability to play jazz, and their role in criminal activities. Sadly, I can feel myself being sucked down into a woke quagmire!

Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

_{Olivia Coleman as Miss Havisham in BBC Adaptation}

Confronted by episode one of the BBC adaptation of Great Expectations, and surprised by the details, I felt I had to check. Did Estella and Miss Havisham really recline in filthy decadence, smoking the best opium imported by Miss Havishams’ father? Or Mrs Joe Gargery inflict dominatrix style beatings on Joe in the intimacy of their bedroom?

In the book Miss Havisham’s father owned a brewery – that was emphasised time and again – he had nothing to do with China and the opium wars, and as for Mrs Joe – a few tweakings of the ear is as far as it went. The changes didn’t make the TV version any worse than the original – maybe it was better. Miss Havisham in a dirty wedding dress spark out on her four poster is a pretty good symbol of decadence, and pointing out Britain’s guilty role in the Opium Wars is right in line with the post colonial interpretations of literature we find everywhere these days – so very woke.

I’ve not got round to watching the rest of the TV series yet, but I did re-read the book this week, so I am ready to see what other liberties they take.

The book itself?

Characters:

An innocent hero transformed by experience – Pip the blacksmith’s boy who finds that being a gentleman is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Grotesque monsters embodying terror and evil – Havisham, Magwitch, Jaggers.

The virtuous, with simple, true hearts – Biddy, Joe, Herbert Pockett.

Greed and treachery – Sarah Pocket, Compeyson.

Plot:

Sentimental endings – so many! Biddy and Joe, Pip and Joe, Herbert and Clara. (Pip and Estella?)

Transformation and redemption: Miss Havisham, Magwitch, Pip.

The unredeemable: Compeyson, Orlick

Great Expectations is a doorstop of a novel, but when you get down to it not much happens. The plot is quite thin, and the denouement spoiled by incredible coincidences.

Pip meets a starving convict, and gives him food. Pip is taken in by bitter old Miss Havisham, who was jilted at the altar, and wants to revenge herself on men by taunting him with his inadequacies. He falls in love with Estella but she can love no one. Miss Havisham pays for him to be apprenticed to Joe as a blacksmith, but Pip comes into money and abandons Joe and Biddy who have treated him so well – he can be a gentleman now. Foolishly Pip thinks the money is from Miss Havisham. He goes to London and we see something – not very much – of life there. Mostly it’s the law courts and Jaggers’ offices. Here the most interesting sections are about Wemmick and his deaf aged parent. Finally we discover that Pip’s inheritance is from Magwitch, the convict, who has returned from Australia so he can enjoy watching Pip become a gentleman. Pip deals with the shock of meeting this man again, and tries to help him evade the authorities – he was transported for life, and if discovered in England faces death by hanging.

Thematically there are sentimental transformations and clear moral principles – there is not much grey in Dickens – he’s either with you or against you. The Christian virtues and vices are centre stage – pride and humility, greed and generosity, charity and selfishness, love and hate. And there is always violence and crime. Dickens shows us the justice system in all its horror and cruelty. He condemns the British class system, and men like Pumblechook whose only interest in Pip is to puff up his own public image. But Dickens makes few comments about how the lot of the working classes can be improved, except by good fortune.

I read this book a couple of times, a long time ago, and what struck me most this time was the way that Magwitch might be reinterpreted in the light of post colonial theory. You might see Pip, the gentleman, as a cipher for empire, living on the profits of Magwitch’s wealth, which was gained through land stolen from the Australian aborigines. Behind the King’s robes is the ugly and uncouth truth of an empire built on slavery and exploitation, a truth to be ashamed of. It is a message Dickens probably did not intend, but that we can’t really avoid now.

Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Peter Hoeg

The opening of Smilla’s Sense of Snow was part of an English Literature unseen paper in the 1990s, but would never be chosen now: the curriculum has become narrower and more traditional. Then English teaching was dominated by books written for and about children, books that would engage their interest, now enjoyment is less important than cultural nationalism.

Even in the 1990s I thought the opening of Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (that’s the English translation) was odd, as they didn’t usually choose extracts from thrillers. Once they chose the opening of John’s Gospel as an unseen passage: I remember that because it said a lot about the reading habits of the examiners!

The extract they selected from Smilla’s Sense of Snow is dark and mysterious and the book is from a genre that I don’t read very often. Perhaps I was projecting my own experiences then in thinking it was a difficult passage for teenagers. Even now it seems impenetrably dark and unnerving, though that is obviously the whole point. It’s a first person narrative that throws us into the heart of the mystery.

Smilla’s Sense of Snow is a post colonial novel, and epitomises a moment in A level English teaching when texts were used to interrogate rather than enforce cultural norms: Smilla is an independent female from an ethnic minority whose land has been exploited and destroyed by cut throat European entrepreneurs. In other words this book is woke, and so is the heroine.

As an Inuit she is skilled in navigation, but she has been uprooted from her homeland, and in Denmark is always an outsider, on her guard against the treachery and greed of the establishment. The rules of gender and European social etiquette are anathema to her, and her social and geographical dislocation contribute to the difficulty she has in developing trusting personal relationships.

A young boy has supposedly fallen from a roof and died. The police put it down to misadventure: boys will be boys, and climbing snowy roofs with scant regard for their own safety is to be expected. But Smilla knows that Isaiah was terrified of heights and would never have ventured out on that snowy roof. Besides the footprints in the snow tell a different story about how he met his end.

Smilla distrusts the authorities and her investigation of the cover up begins in the bureaucratic offices they inhabit, but it ends in a mythic confrontation on an ice floe off the coast of Greenland.

What compelled me to read this book was the character of the heroine. Smilla is of a mathematical bent and her musings on the nature of mathematics and science are enough on their own to make the novel interesting. At first her choices and decisions surprise the reader because Hoeg is careful to make Smilla herself the most interesting mystery in the whole book. Later, as we get to know her, the events become more predictable, though they never cease to be dramatic.

The early sections of this novel are the most interesting. Smilla is a precursor of Saga Noren: obsessive and amoral. Later as her violent actions become more predictable and the events less credible, the writer, who is struggling to find an acceptable denouement, chooses that old Shakespearean favourite: Exit, Pursued by a Bear.