Read Across Canada: A 2013 Challenge discussion

Goal of 20 books, as many provinces as possible

Coming through Slaughter--Michael Ondaatje
Author: Ontario
3 stars

I wanted to love this first novel of Ondaatje, but I am left feeling it is like a jazz improvisation that doesn’t achieve flight enough to linger long in the mind. My disappointment feels similar to looking for a Picasso Blue Period in the origins of his mastery and turning up instead an aborted Cubist Period. Still, it was worth it for me to experience this dalliance with a postmodernist structure and witness his transition from poet to novelist.

This slim 1976 book is an ambitious attempt to bring to life a seminal black jazz cornet player, Buddy Bolden, at the turn of the 20th century. His innovation of blending blues with funeral parade music has been considered a precursor to ragtime jazz. The setting is the infamous Storyville red-light district of New Orleans, which brings to light both the wayward energies of the era as well as the tough way of life for the women involved. Bolden works part-time as a barber, gathers gossip for a local weekly celebrity news tabloid, and gets in a lot of trouble with booze and women. At one point, he abandons his wife and child for a ménage with a married couple and then stops performing music for a two-year stretch living at a cabin on owed by an old friend from his wild youth. At a comeback performance in a parade, he has a break from reality and tragically ends up committed as a state mental hospital for the rest of his life.

From this sketchy history of a not very sympathetic figure, Ondaatje crafts a sketchy narrative, strong on form and improvised impressions, but light on significant insight. Of course, one can say all novels and biographies come up short in explaining the origins of creative genius. So it’s not so much that aspect which disappoints, but rather that I don’t really get a satisfying portrayal of Bolden as a human character. Other interesting key characters, such as Bolden’s policeman friend Webb and the photographer of prostitutes, E.J. Bellocq, are also not seriously fleshed out.



Instead we get a poet’s vision of Bolden’s experiences from his environment, infused with sex, alcohol, and periodic violence, and persistent renderings that reflect his passion for music. Some of this works very well and sometimes it overreaches. One particular success lies in the way Ondaatje’s narration of the tale often emulates jazz in its progressions on various themes and in the way the voice is passed around to various characters. I end with a few quotes to illustrate his prose and help potential readers decide whether to give the book a spin.

Here a fellow musician describes Bolden’s style:
He’s mixing them up. .He’s playing the blues and the hymn sadder than the blues and then the blues sadder than the hymn. That is the first time I heard blues and hymns cooked up together. …It sounded like a battle between the Good Lord and the Devil.

Here he comes to founder over binding his identity so much to his music:
You’d play and people would grab you and grab you till you began to—you couldn’t help it—believe you were doing something important. And all you were doing was stealing chickens, nailing things to the wall. Every time you stopped playing you became a lie. So I got so, with Bellocq, I didn’t trust any of that … any more. It was just playing games. We were furnished rooms and Bellocq was a window looking out.

Here his perceptions while swimming with his girlfriend exposes his growing mental imbalance:
Below our heads all the evil dark swimming creatures are waiting to brush us into nightmare into heart attack to suck us under into the darkness into the complications. Her loon laugh. The dull star of white water under each of us. Swimming towards the sound of madness.

Here a period of sobriety in the retreat at his friend’s cabin also brings interludes of unreality:
What do you want to know about me Webb? I’m alone. I desire every woman I remember. Everything is clear here and still I feel my brain has walked away and is watching me. I feel I hover over the objects in this house, over every person in my memory—like those painted saints in my mother’s church who seem to always have six or seven inches between them and the ground. Posing as humans.

For a two minute clip of Wynton Marsalis playing a Bolton tune, try this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1g-1Gp...

For a 10 minute segment on the innovations of Bolton and historical images of his environment, check out this PBS clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paFK1l...

Interesting review. I enjoyed the jazz. Was it part of the Ken Burns PBS series that ran on TV a few years ago?