Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan - review

Afro-Germans don't usually get a look-in when the narratives of Nazi Germany are told, yet the black presence in Germany goes back to at least the 18th century, and later waves of African immigrants produced German-born offspring who, by the interwar years, numbered several thousand. In this novel, the fictional Hieronymous "Hiero" Falk, around whom the plot revolves, is one of them – a Mischling or "half-breed" from the Rhineland.

Hiero is a jazz trumpeter extraordinaire. Only 19, he is a member of the Hot Time Swingers, a popular jazz band forbidden to play live in late 1930s Berlin because the Nazis have banned their "degenerate" music. Along with two of his fellow band mates, Sid Griffiths and Chip Jones, both African-Americans, Hiero escapes to Paris in 1939 where, when war is declared and the Germans invade, they go into hiding. As they struggle to get forged exit visas to leave France, Hiero and Sid, rather implausibly, roam the dangerous, abandoned streets, despite knowing they are at great risk of being rounded up by the Gestapo. Hiero is arrested, and we later hear that he was incarcerated in a concentration camp and apparently died not long after his release.

Sid, the narrator, moves the story, set primarily in Paris and Berlin, back and forth from the onset of the war to Berlin in 1992, where he and Chip are guests at the premiere of a documentary about Hiero, who has become a jazz legend. Sid, now in his 80s, harbours a terrible secret of betrayal. Chip, a celebrated jazz drummer, also has betrayal issues, and has discovered that Hiero, who's been presumed dead for so long, is actually alive in Poland. The men decide to visit him.

Despite the book's blurb tantalising us with promises of a black German experience, this novel is really about Sid and his version of events that led up to Hiero's arrest. It's also about his strained relationship with Chip. But as black jazz musicians they are already a familiar motif in American culture, and there's a touch of central casting about their portrayal. And while Sid's slangy vernacular is often charismatic, elsewhere the novel is problematic. It's hard to accept that both men would have chosen to live under the tyrannical regime of the Third Reich. Nor do we get a sense that they've been overly concerned by the state thuggery, mass imprisonments, Aryan ideology, Nazi rallies, and the very public persecution of Jews and others. Living in such a climate, Sid, who can pass for white, muses that the persecution of black people "Just wasn't no kind of priority back in those years." His primary concern is his music: "Think about it, a bunch of German and American kids meeting up in Berlin and Paris between the wars to make all this wild joyful music before the Nazis kick it to pieces." It's hard to care about this selfish and, it transpires, malevolent man.

Far more interesting is Hiero, whose memory hovers like a spectre over the novel but is never properly realised. Like other Afro-German citizens, he is made stateless by the Nazis, and his could have been the story with the power to move and surprise. But we never really get to know him except through the jaundiced gaze of Sid. We are briefly told that the teenage Hiero fled the Rhineland for Berlin when Goering instituted his plan for the forced sterilisation of all mixed-race children. And that's it: the Afro-German story is once again sidelined.

In spite of this, Edugyan really can write, and the final chapter is redemptive. But if it's an Afro-German story you're after, then Hans Massaquoi's extraordinary Destined to Witness: Growing up Black in Nazi Germany is a good place to start.

Bernardine Evaristo's Blonde Roots is published by Penguin.

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