Customer Reviews

Twelve Bar Blues

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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. Mary Whipple

Patrick Neate's "Twelve Bar Blues (TBB)" richly deserves the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. It's an epic novel tracing the torrid lives and lineage of gifted black cornet player Lick Holden from New Orleans who in the 1920s spends half his life searching for his coffee coloured half-sister Sylvie and present day retired prostitute Sylvia Di Napoli from London who will go to the ends of this world to discover her lost identity. Interlocking with these two fascinating stories is an experimental piece of magical realism that connects the past of Lick and Sylvia with the present in black Africa. Though the unfolding plot reveals a sprawling family tree that cuts across three continents, it isn't hard to guess how Lick and Sylvia are related to one another. Just as Lick survives many close shaves with Naps as his guardian angel, Sylvia's chance encounter with white drifter Jim Tulloch on route to New York turns out to be the source of her redemption. There is a recurring line in the novel about knowing or not knowing one's past and its bearing on the present that best sums up the quest of our protagonists. Lick knows his past but how has this helped him deal with his one obsession ? Sylvia, on the other hand, is resigned to a bleak future as an ex-prostitute and retired singer. She thinks discovering her past will save her but is too jaded to see that redemption is sitting right next to her. Who can blame her, though ? Fate and chance have a way of bringing a curious symmetry to life that we least expect. The African subplot in Neate's enthralling tale of ethnicity, lost identity and fate isn't as loose and arbitrary as it seems. The village chief has no hangups about his past. He's proudly African and has no slave history in his family to contend with. His problem is with the future, in particular an urban wife and the uncertain paternity of the child she's carrying. TBB is a phenomenal literary achievement. It's earthy, brutal and passionate, yet wonderfully lyrical and otherworldly at the same time. Just as the fourth part of Lick's anatomy expands when he's riding the crest of a note from his cornet, the novel is magically transformed whenever Neate comes up with a passage that resonates with irony. TBB is a masterpiece of modern fiction that has to be read. Don't miss it !

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.

This is a touching and eye-opening book on American jazz, race, and African-American heritage that absolutely no American could have written. It takes an Englishman steps removed from our race relations, just as it took an earlier generation of Brits to reinterpret American blues music into contemporary rock.

What a book this is, weaving magic and gritty reality, fantasy and fact. I haven't read a book this good in years. So glad I picked up Neate's book City of Tiny Lights at random off a libray shelf. That book was great, this is better.

Note: One reviewer here panned this book for being unrealistic in its portrayal of Africa, but I'm guessing that since Neate has lived all over Africa in cities and remote villages, he might just know what he's writing.

A journey of identity and tracing roots takes us through Africa, New Orleans and New York amidst in an environment of music and cultural insights.

There were teasing references to some of the jazz greats and it was a nice musical journey from Africa to New Orleans. While the story starts with 2 best friends and a woman they both loved in 18th century Africa, the journeys their descendants take introduce us to the budding jazz movement and beyond. Unfolding the branches of the family trees through the generations and unraveling how they each descended from the 3 original Africans in the midst of all the music and tribal magic kept me turning the pages.

I would have liked more details rather than passing references to Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, King Oliver, and Fate Marable, but that would be my only criticism of this book.

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.

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.