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.

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.

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 !