Half Blood Blues by Edi Edugyan

Previously published in the Herald magazine. 

It isn’t often that a book set in war-torn Paris and Nazi Germany is about anything other than the Holocaust. It’s even rarer, in the light of so much existing evocative Holocaust literature that a book about Afro-German musicians in WW2 can hold its own the way Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues does. It’s not a book specifically about jazz, or specifically about the treatment of Afro-Germans by Nazis because at it’s a core it is a book about friendship, brotherhood and betrayal.

The narrative is in the voice of Sid, the upright bass player of a band called The Hot Time Swingers who were once a part ofBerlin’s avant-garde music scene. Jazz has been denounced as ‘degenerate music’ by the Nazis, and because the band includes a nineteen year old ‘Mischling’ mixed race German trumpet genius Hiero who is ‘black as a starless night’, as well a Jewish pianist, they are forced into hiding to avoid increasingly violent run-ins with the Gestapo. Hiero is arrested at the very start of the book, and the narrative then alternates between Sid and drummer Chip as octogenarians returning to Berlin for the screening of a documentary based on Hiero’s lost talent, and Sid’s flashbacks of events leading up to Hiero’s arrest. Sid is not the most reliable of narrators: he is insecure of being the least talented of the band, jealous of Hiero’s immense natural talent and of course his relationship with Delilah, who introduces the band to Louis Armstrong. Although Hiero sees in Sid a protector and friend, Edugyan makes certain that her readers only see Hiero through Sid’s jaundiced eye, focusing on their complicated relationship.

Hiero’s story falls into mythic jazz legend territory, with a possibly untrue family history revealed much later in the book. The only thing that stands out is Hiero’s almost impossible genius with his horn: ‘like there was this trapped panic, this barely held-in chaos, and Hiero hisself was the lid’. He is a tragic figure right away – not just because his arrest and probable death at a concentration camp are clear from the very start of the story, but also because his character, his personality and even his body seem to not be able to contain his musical genius. Half Blood Blues is also very much about the music that was being made in secret under Nazi rule, about what the music and the very act of cutting a record in that time represented. There was anguish, loneliness, a rawness that came from the circumstances of the musicians and wound its way into their music, pulsating mainly through Hiero’s trumpet. It is ‘the very sound of age, of growing older, of adolescent rage being tempered by a man’s heart’.

Edugyan’s narrative style is pitch perfect - the thrum of Sid’s bass exists in every line, in the very rhythm of the slang he uses. Half Blood Blues, while firmly rooted in its historical background, may not be the quintessential look at the Afro-German experience of life under Nazi control, it may not be the perfect jazz novel, but it doesn’t need to be – it’s a deeper, more complex and rhythmic narrative about desire, despair and the longing to create, to be more than ‘faces blurred in the glass, ghosts.’