The Greatcoat, The Unconsoled and Twelve Bar Blues

A clever little ghost story by a terrific writer. Once I had read Helen Dunmore's "The Betrayal", she immediately joined the list of authors whose books I want to read. "The Greatcoat" is a short novel, but one that is properly haunting, but never horrific. For me, it brought back memories of the early fifties, sleeping on metal framed beds in unheated bedrooms with frost on the inside of the draughty windows. This book superbly captures post war Britain, telling what austerity really meant.

Well, I did finish it. "The Unconsoled" is the strangest book I have ever read, and probably if it had not been for the author, Kazuo Ishiguro, I would have given up early on. Someone said that it was worth it for the last 100 pages. No! They are just like the rest of the book, one long, very detailed dreamlike experience. But nobody has had a dream like this. I think that Ishiguro might have started to write a short story about this type of dream, but got carried away and let the thing get out of hand on purpose. It's as if he gives Ryder (whether it is his dream or not, it hardly matters) the opportunity to find his own way through the story. However, the prose is always spot on, but only what you would expect from this author. The tone is as mysterious as the narrative. This is because Ryder meets a succession of characters, all of whom want him to do something for them. Ryder has a busy schedule, but the unexpected demands upon his time leads to a more and more agitated state. If he heard "it shouldn't take long" one more time, he might have screamed. So eventually, the book becomes a series of almost hallucinatory diversions. It is hard for me to recommend this book. As one reviewer puts it "reading not as pleasure but as anxiety, as irresolution". If you are looking for something normal, can I suggest "Nocturnes".

Fortis "Lick" Holden. Man or myth? The legendary cornet player from New Orleans is at the heart of this brilliant novel. "Twelve Bar Blues" by Patrick Neate won the Whitbread Novel Award in 2001, and well deserved in my opinion. A complex, yet smoothly dovetailed plot switches between the jazz clubs of that city in the early twentieth century, to present day Africa and America. The early chapter's concentrate on the childhood and youth of Lick, as he finds how hard life is for the black community in the early 1900's. We then switch to coffee coloured Sylvia who, at 45, is a prostitute (retired) and singer who gets talking on the plane to New York to Jim, a young white man. Sylvia is on a mission, to find out about her past, and Jim becomes the rock in what becomes a major quest. It is how the author makes this a gripping story of identity that is so successful.