Review: Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues

Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues (Serpent’s Tail, 2011) is one of the more outstanding entries on this year’s Booker Prize longlist. A lyrical, complex, layered narrative of friendship, betrayal, and jazz, the book approaches well-worn narrative ground with a fresh perspective. Edugyan is clearly an author to watch, as her previous work, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, was equally stunning and quickly captured international attention after its release in 2004.

Western Europe in 1940 is hardly untrod territory for fiction; authors and readers keep returning to the Second World War and it’s starting to feel like a stale, cheap, easy way out for storytelling. Plop your characters in Berlin or Paris in 1940 and have at it. Foreshadowing included free of charge. Likewise, the suppression of jazz in Berlin in the 1930s and early 1940s is not an entirely new choice of subject. Half Blood Blues managed to bring something new to both settings, however, illustrating that there is more to explore from this period of history.

The tale opens as our narrator, Sid Griffiths, describes the arrest of fellow musician Hieronymous Falk, an up and comer in Paris. Readers are taken back and forth between 1930s-1940s Berlin and later Paris, and Berlin in 1992, three years after the fall of the wall, where Griffiths attends a documentary screening highlighting Falk’s life. It is here that the narrative constructed by Griffiths starts to fall apart, and readers learn that the surface story is not what it seems.

Race and national identity run at the core of this story; Griffiths describes himself as ‘high yellow’ and discusses the fact that his family is light enough to pass even in the core of the South, while fellow band members Falk and Chip Jones are much darker skinned, becoming obvious targets for a society where anyone who doesn’t look ‘Aryan’ is viewed with suspicion. In an era when the Nazi government targeted Black men, most particularly the ‘Rhineland bastards’ like Falk of mixed German and Black descent, skin colour and national heritage mattered to a high degree. This becomes a key, pivotal point in the story as the band of musicians attempts to make their way from Berlin to Paris, and later to safety in the United States.

Initially, this is the story of a tragedy; a young musician cut down by the Nazis at his prime, after playing with Louis Armstrong and cutting one of the best jazz records ever made, right in front of the eyes of one of his bandmates, who is powerless to do anything. As the story unfolds, a darker truth develops and it’s a tale of betrayal and selfishness, not simple wartime misery. Our narrator is a tarnished man who lets his bitterness get the best of him over the course of a tale, with very unfortunate consequences.

Sid Griffiths is fortunate enough to brush fame, but not talented enough to grab it for himself. Unable to balance personal and professional jealousy, he makes hasty and bad choices in a high stakes world where small decisions may have a big impact later. This is not a story that ends with a happy redemption, either, where readers can rest easy in their decision to trust the narrator at the start.

The language in Half Blood Blues is exquisite; the characters are distinct and resonant, and Griffith’s voice remains strong throughout. His dialect, Black Baltimore overlaid with German, is rich and complex. Edugyan brings the scenes she describes to vibrant life, whether it’s musicians playing forbidden music in the depths of Berlin or Griffiths, aged and worn, shuffling to answer his front door in Baltimore.

It is also a very stark, unflinching, unforgiving narrative. Edugyan does not relent when it comes to her characters in a story where no clear heroes and villains emerge. She is not the first to explore cowardice and betrayal in the heart of the war, but she does it very well. The characters wound each other in the middle of war time in scenes described so lavishly and beautifully that sometimes it takes a minute to realise that the frothy confections are rotten at the core.

This is also a story about who tells stories, both directly and indirectly. The history of Germans of African descent is not widely covered in English language literature, nor is the complex racial rubric once used by the Nazis to determine which people with dark skin were the most important targets for incarceration and forcible sterilisation. Edugyan challenges readers to ask why these stories are not more widely told; over 400 ‘Rhineland bastards’ were sterilised, starting in 1937, and yet they are rarely depicted in history, let alone in novels.

The unreliable narrator is, of course, a well-established trope in fiction, but Edugyan plays it with skill, and it works in service to this particular work, which is, by and large, very well constructed. The scenes with Armstrong stand out as too contrived and convenient, an effort to weave more jazz history into a story that didn’t really need it, since it is already so steeped in the art, history, and culture of jazz, through the narrative and the narrator himself. Fortunately, this rough exception occupies a very small portion of an otherwise smooth work.

Half Blood Blues is an excellent entry in a body of literature that might seem tired by now, illustrating what a great author, and a great tale, can unearth in seemingly overworked ground.