Halfblood Blues by Esi Edugyan

27 Nov 2011

Halfblood Blues
Esi Edugyan
Serpent’s Tail, Paperback; 343 pages
ISBN 978-1846687754

£10.99

Gordon Weetman

It’s surprising there aren’t more novels about jazz under the Nazis. The contrast between improvised music and fascism provides a powerful ready-made metaphor for the battle between freedom and tyranny: on the one hand, unbound creativity and self-expression; on the other, brutal and monolithic destruction.

Esi Edugyan’s Booker-shortlisted debut takes this juxtaposition as its starting-point. “Think about it,” the narrator declares halfway through the second chapter. “A bunch of German and American kids meeting up in Berlin and Paris between the wars to make all this wild joyful music before the Nazis kick it to pieces.” As ventriloquism goes, this line feels clumsy and transparent – a clear statement of intent on the part of the author. Thankfully, the excitable, sub-Kerouac tone does not persist: what we get over the next three hundred pages is something far more slippery and subversive.

As the title suggests, Half Blood Blues is a novel about race, and about the various ways in which race can be constructed or construed. It follows the adventures of three black musicians in 1930s Europe, a continent shadowed by the threat of war. The protagonist, Sid, and his boyhood friend Chip are American citizens who grew up under Jim Crow laws on the unforgiving streets of Baltimore. Hieronymus (“Hiero”), their German-born band-mate, claims to be the offspring of a Rhineland woman and an African diplomat: “He was a Mischling, a half-breed, but so dark no soul ever like to guess his mama a white Rhinelander.”

Whereas Chip and Hiero are identifiably black, Sid is light enough to pass for white: “Son of two Baltimore quadroons, I come out straight-haired, green-eyed, a right little Spaniard. In Baltimore this given me a softer ride than some. I be lying if I said it ain’t back in Berlin, too.” Of the three main characters, Hiero’s situation is the most precarious: the Nazis have recently revoked his identity papers, along with those of all other black Germans, effectively rendering him stateless, a non-person. Sid comments of Hiero that “if his face wasn’t of the Fatherland, just bout everything else bout him rooted him there right good.” Hiero is trapped: he speaks no language other than German, and without valid papers he has no viable means of escape.

Half Blood Blues opens with Hiero’s abduction by the Gestapo. During a foolhardy night-time excursion through occupied Paris, the malnourished trumpeter is captured in a café while attempting to buy milk. Chip watches the ‘Boots’ lead his friend away: “I stood there … with my hands hanging like strange weights against my thighs, my chest full of something like water. Stood there watching Hiero go.”

After this stomach-churning intro, the action jumps forward five decades. Sid is retired, having long ago given up on jazz, whilst Chip is nearing the end of a lengthy and distinguished music career. By contrast, Hiero has become – somewhat improbably, considering his sparse discography – one of the great lost legends of jazz, on a par with artists like Parker and Coltrane. Sid and Chip are about to return to Berlin for the premiere of a documentary about Hiero’s life. The documentary was financed by a German TV company as part of the national process of vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the past. But Sid has his own buried guilt to deal with, and it looks like the past may finally be coming back to haunt him.

On the night before they are due to fly out, Chip turns up on Sid’s doorstep with shocking news: unbeknownst to Sid and the rest of the world, Hiero is alive and hiding in Poland under a pseudonym. Sid seems reluctant to believe him, and even less enthusiastic when Chip suggests they hire a car after the screening and go looking for their former band-mate. It almost feels as though Sid has an ulterior motive for wanting Hiero to stay hidden. In a framing device familiar from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, Edugyan’s novel now divides into two parallel timelines. In one we follow the three characters’ struggles in Nazi-dominated Europe, and in the other we accompany Sid and Chip on their mission to uncover the truth about Hiero’s disappearance.

Half Blood Blues has a blockbuster of a premise, which would transfer impressively to the silver screen. However, there are certain niggling plot issues that any prospective screenwriter would be well advised to address. The lynching that Sid endures at the hands of the documentary maker stretches credibility, with Sid watching in horror as the on-screen Chip accuses him of handing Hiero over to the Nazis. Chip later apologises and claims his words were taken out of context, but considering the fraught nature of the subject matter, why would either man agree to feature in the film without a preliminary viewing?

In the Nazi-era sections of the book, the characters’ actions suffer from a puzzling lack of urgency. Paper-less Hiero is trapped in Europe, but the two Americans don’t seem particularly desperate to leave. If anything, they are more energized by the prospect of meeting up with Louis Armstrong in Paris, and cutting what they hope will be their breakthrough record, than by the need to escape from the Nazis, who have recently declared their music “degenerate.” Perhaps Sid and Chip have simply succumbed to paralysis: vulnerable people have been known to make tragedy inevitable by refusing to admit the terrifying scale of the danger, by clinging desperately to familiar routines until it is too late to let go. However, there is little sense of this in Edugyan’s prose, and the resulting lack of narrative tension leads to long slack passages in the middle chapters of the book.

Edugyan is a gifted writer, with a knack for snappy phrases and vivid imagery. Hiero’s trumpet, for example, is “a cheap-looking thing, dented, like a foil-wrapped chocolate been in a pocket too long”. However, Sid’s down-home narration veers dangerously close to cliché, and certain passages betray an uneasy balance between Baltimore street-slang and high-register ‘literary’ writing. Similarly, the musicians’ dialogue poses awkward questions: supposedly they converse in standardised German, or Hochdeutsch, but even Hiero’s speech is littered with jive-talk, an inconsistency Edugyan excuses by claiming that ‘the Kid’ likes to mimic his older band-mates. Yet how would one translate an idiom like “Let’s ankle” while retaining any semblance of grammatical sense?

Despite all its problems, Half Blood Blues remains a compelling read, and the climactic plot-twist is little short of hair-raising. But by this point Edugyan has squandered a good deal of momentum, and, as any great jazz soloist knows, the secret to success is keeping the audience on their toes.