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Every week we ask a reader to review a recently-published book. This week’s review is by cacs.

Combine jazz, Berlin, Nazis, Paris, race, and war and you’ll probably end up with Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues. Or The United Colors of Jazz in Nazi Germany.

Edugyan’s second novel, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2011,  may not seem to have the most original of themes. Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories might even come to mind. They’re made of the same stuff anyway: jazz and Berlin. But the two novels play very different tunes.

Half Blood Blues is as polyrhythmic and blue-noted as any of your favorite jazz pieces. You’re not into jazz? Good. In all likelihood you’ll be searching YouTube for videos of Louis Armstrong’s performances after you’ve read this novel. And even if you happen to hate jazz, the novel is so lusciously-written that you may find yourself in the mood for Satchmo.

Esi Edugyan weaves a tale of dreams, jealousy, guilt, loss and betrayal into what one character calls “a damn braid of mistakes.” Mistakes that make for a heartrending story with Louis Armstrong’s gravelly voice lending mass to the plot.

The novel opens in 1940. The Germans have just made Paris a Nazi resort town. The narrator, Sydney “Sid” Griffiths, an American bassist of a popular jazz band known as the Hot-Time Swingers, is out on the town with his bandmate, Hieronymus “Hiero” Flak. Hiero is a young genius trumpeteer, a black half-breed German. A “mischling”.

The two friends are looking for, of all things, milk, after a long night of trying to cut a record. Boots (this is how German occupation forces are referred to throughout the novel) are crawling all over the city, f___ing up people’s lives. Hiero gets arrested and is hauled off to god-knows-where. He is never heard from again. And the only witness to Hiero’s last moments as a freeman is Sid.

Fifty years later, Hieronymus Flak becomes this mythical jazz icon whose only proof of genius is an obscure recording entitled “Half-Blood Blues”. Who is this Heiro guy anyway? What happened to him after the German military took him? Who are the Hot-Time Swingers?

Apart from Sid and Hiero there’s Chip, an American drummer who came to Germany with Sid and would rather keep his middle name a secret. Ernst, a clarinetist, is the son of a wealthy German industrialist. Fritz, the other clarinetist, is a Bavarian built like the Incredible Hulk. Paul, the handsome German Jew, is the group’s pianist, designated Casanova and discoverer of Hiero. There’s also Delilah, another American import, the requisite female character who causes friction within the band. And there’s Louis Armstrong himself making a cameo appearance.

As in real life, friends come and go throughout the book, just not in the usual falling-out kind of way. This is World War II and people’s loyalties are tested. Sacrifices are made. People die or simply vanish.

The novel is peppered with sharp, humorous exchanges between its motley crew of musicians. It’s not so much an action-thriller across Europe in World War II as it is an adventure through time and a meditation on the meaning of friendship.

The reader travels fifty years into the future and fifty years back to gloomy cafés and cobblestone streets in Berlin, Baltimore and Paris. En route it explores those corners of our hearts we would rather not visit but where we hide out whenever we feel that the universe has been unfair to us.

In this Facebook era where being a “friend” has lost most of its meaning, devolved into a clickable act, Half Blood Blues reminds us of the original, pre-digital meaning of Friend.

You may find this story achingly familiar. We don’t admit it, but we all have friends whom we absolutely abhor (or are just annoyed with). And yet we allow them to remain our friends. Never mind the irritating transgressions, the callousness of their behavior, and their pathological douchebaggery. Somehow, for reasons we can’t explain, they fill a void no other person can occupy. If it takes a douchebag to fill that void, so be it.

While reading Half Blood Blues you may catch yourself grinning stupidly or feeling murderous as you recognize the way your own friends have treated you over the years. You might even realize that you, reader, have been the douchebag all these years. That you have not only been a terrible friend but a selfish, despicable creature.

Or you might gain a newfound appreciation of jazz. For this possibility alone it is worth getting a copy of Half Blood Blues.

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