Book’s narrator sympathetic, but fallible
The Vancouver Sun book club is discussing Victoria author Esi Edugyan’s Half- Blood Blues, which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was nominated for the Man Booker Prize, the Governor General’s Award and the Roger’s Writers Trust Fiction Prize. We will be chatting online with the author at noon on Jan. 28. Please join us at www. vancouversun. com/ books.
Monique Sherrett: I’ve been thinking about the characters this week, in particular Sid, Chip and The Kid, and whether I believe Sid’s account throughout the book. He’s a fallible narrator as far as I can tell. Early on we get the story of Hiero getting arrested by the Boots ( I love the slang in this novel). And at the time I sympathized with Sid. I saw and understood his fear at being caught in a trap and protecting himself. It’s not excusable but I can imagine that sense of fear.
As the novel progresses, Edugyan fine tunes the focus. We get more and more details that lead up to that moment, and as that sharpening takes place ( maybe as brighter light is shone on Sid), we see more of his make up. And he’s not good.
One of the readers mentioned Sid getting kicked out of the band. Man, he ain’t never made the band. He didn’t make the cut. He wasn’t good enough for Armstrong.
It’s not that Sid doesn’t have talent, but his jealousy and the nastiness it creates muddies the waters between him and his friends. It undermines what the group is trying to do — both in music and escaping Paris.
The Kid gains my sympathy throughout the book. I don’t know what’s eating at him, but compared to Sid, he is the bigger man.
Julia Denholm: I’ve just read Monique’s post and agree — we get the story from Sid’s perspective, but he is an unreliable narrator. As readers, we are predisposed to like the narrator until we are given reason not to. For me, Chip’s revelation about Sid at the film screening turns the novel inside out. I want to go back and read it again with a full picture of Sid’s character in mind; it will be interesting to see what different things I notice.
Ian Weir: Looking back to one reader’s issue with Edugyan’s use of Louis Armstrong, we can ask if that is legitimate. Well, as someone who commits historical fiction himself, I’d come at that two ways. For starters, context is everything, and it seems to me that the unreliability of Sid as a narrator creates considerable leeway.
There’s also the broader context of world literature — everything from Shakespeare’s character assassination of Richard III to Hilary Mantel’s hatchet- job on St. Thomas More. I mean, yes, chronologically speaking Dick and Tom are much deader than Louis Armstrong. But there’s a long tradition that says dead folks are fair game, and fiction is fiction.
However, there’s still the question of whether it’s esthetically legitimate. Personally, I loved Edugyan’s portrait of Armstrong — I thought it was one of the highlights of a splendid novel. But if readers are being distanced by it, then that’s actually something for a novelist to be concerned about. Did others have the same issue?
Monique Sherrett: I didn’t have a problem with the portrayal of Armstrong. Armstrong also left a ton of audio diary tapes that when listening to them, give you a sense of that gravelly voice and also about what was happening for him day to day.
There’s a segment that is really intimate where he’s trying to coax his wife to bed. She realizes he’s using the recorder and tears a strip off him. Even listening to the audio — the man’s voice — there are a ton of assumptions that can be built into what we’re hearing directly from his lips. So if in fiction, his minor role is portrayed in a way that someone questions, I don’t think that’s Edugyan’s fault as a novelist. If Armstrong was the main character and the presentation of his actions was distracting then I’d still feel the same way. It can be bothersome though for people who have deep subject knowledge, or even first hand experience of an event, to entertain something that seems off from their perspective. Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Margaret Thatcher seems to be drawing this criticism as well.
Julia Denholm: I love Ian’s point about Shakespeare and Richard III. Everyone should read Josephene Tey’s classic novel The Daughter of Time.