Gwen Ansell
All that follows by Jim Crace (Picador)
Men of the South by Zukiswa Wanner (Kwela)
Musicians are different. Share space with one and you’ll learn. It’s not the difference imagined by breathless showbiz writers: players are not demigods; they belch, fart and fornicate like the rest of us. But watch a horn player on the border of sleep and wakefulness and his lips will be shaping a solo to the tune on the radio. Drink coffee with a pianist at a mall and her fingers will reflexively move to the melody in the muzak.
Musicians spend hours at practice or thinking silently about sound. If there’s a choice between rescuing axe or spouse from a burning building, you don’t want to be married to a guitarist.
Those writers who successfully call up musicians in their fiction understand this. Walter Mosley’s bluesman, “Soupspoon” Wise; James Baldwin’s bebop pianist, Sonny, and his soul singer, Arthur Montana; Mandla Langa’s Mbongeni and Excelsior; and Fred Khumalo’s Peace Ndaba — all live in and through music even as they live in and through actions, decisions or relationships.
So does Jim Crace’s protagonist, British jazzman Lennie Less. (“Rhymes with penniless,” says his agent sardonically.) Less has been a moderately successful saxophonist, but now mopes at home, hardly playing. The ostensible cause, a painful shoulder, is clearly not just a physical wound.
His partner, Francine, returns each day exhausted from teaching and spends wakeful nights waiting for a call from her runaway daughter. Both remember times when life was more vibrant — “but that was then”.
The jazz myth
The jazz myth, shaped by American critics steeped in greedy individualism, is that the music is made by heroic (though often outlaw) soloists. Not so. Jazz is other people: your band mates who have, in trombonist George Lewis’s phrase, “got your back”.
Crace invokes this perfectly as Less replays a triumphant concert — the night he met Francine — that he was forced to play solo after his band mates had been stranded by snow.
“Leonard measures every note he plays against each chord — each sweetness or each dissidence — that they might have offered had they been on stage with him. He sends his absent rhythm section clues, invites them to add accents to his saxophone, to harmonize with him, to influence the colour of his play. He imagines how a single furry and hypnotic note that he holds for the full length of a bar might be accessorised if there were comrades on the stage.”
But now the saxman, formerly also active in social movements, has sunk into solipsism. His introspective state is symbolised by his new political correctness: an obsession with healthy and ethical eating. And then a TV news bulletin shows him the face of Maxim, an old student friend unseen for years, holding hostages at gunpoint in a political protest.
Reluctantly and ambivalently, Less summons the courage to move back into the world. He reconnects, equally reluctantly and ambivalently, with other people: Maxim’s daughter, her mother — an old flame — and various random individuals in the siege-watching crowd. He makes no grand, passionate political gestures; he simply becomes, as the African proverb has it, a person again through the grace of other people.
Low-key melody
It’s a low-key melody that Crace plays, but it’s note perfect. All That Follows is an impressive addition to the ranks of the jazz novel, both in the explicit soundtrack of the words and in the deeper harmonies of the story’s structure: take chances, connect, make music.
Zukiswa Wanner has also made a jazz musician, trumpeter Mfundo, central to Men of the South. Mfundo is one of a trio of male leads, with Mzilikazi, the closeted gay man, and Tinaye, the Zimbabwean, forced to make impossible choices to find a home. A woman links them all: strong, smart Sli, friend to Mzilikazi and lover of the others.
Men of the South is an incisive and captivating third book. Wanner has always had the ability to make readers laugh out loud, but here she disciplines the wit: it is rarer and all the more effective for that. Her capacity to plot has grown significantly. Sli, viewed through the various prisms of the male gaze, provides a powerful anchor for all three interrelated stories and emerges as a complete and recognisable person.
Of the men, Tinaye is the most poignant. At every juncture — and without preaching — Wanner demonstrates how his life, his choices and his sometimes tragic effect on others are distorted by the absurdity of being a “foreign native” in South Africa. That phrase is jazzman Jonas Gwangwa’s; he borrowed it from apartheid but, sadly, it fits our current immigration regime equally well.
The weak link is Mfundo. His trumpet is mentioned once. We never meet him practising or playing. There is no sense of the music in his life. When Crace calls up Lennie Less’s concert, he’s providing not only local colour, but also a telling metaphor for the heart of the man. Men of the South is a fine novel, but it isn’t a jazz book. For all the difference Mfundo’s career makes, Wanner might as well have made him an accountant.