Product Description

Celebrated trumpeter Joss Moody has died and the jazz world is in mourning. But in death, Joss can no longer guard the secret he kept all his life, and Colman, his adoring son, must confront the truth: the man whom he believed to be his father was, in fact a woman.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17287 in Books
• Published on: 1999-08-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 200 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Jackie Kay's first novel is a curious and haunting story about mixed-race jazz trumpeter Joss Moody (Irish mother, black father), who turns out, on his death, to have been a woman all along. The story begins with that discovery. Thereafter it traces its consequences for his white wife Millie, who always knew, and his adopted black son Colman, who didn't. Millie rehearses the stages of her relationship with Joss, reworking an intense and abiding love and commitment in which gender is, oddly, never really an issue. Colman, by contrast, is driven, in the period immediately following his father's death, by anger and an intense feeling of betrayal, to try to "out" his father and complete his humiliation as a kind of personal expiation. As he retraces the steps of Joss's life, however, he begins gradually to change his mind. Kay has won acclaim for her poetry. Here she shows that she can harness her plangent voice to a narrative, producing writing of real maturity. Race and gender are deftly woven into its fabric, without insistence, to reveal a troubling ordinariness about fragmentation and confusions of identity in contemporary British life. --Lisa Jardine

Customer Reviews

Sensitive study of loss of a loved with feelings confused
Written mainly as a series of interior landscapes with relatively short sketches of the outside world in London and Scotland, the work stimulates your curiosity and engages your empathy. The focus of the story, Joss Moody, deceased trumpeter, appears largely and tantalisingly through others' eyes. This approach is no mere device, it is the point: what Joss meant to those who knew and loved him/her and how his "deception", as some define her/his secret, affects their loyalty and feelings for him/her.

A certain frustration may come from not having one's curiosity fulfilled about Joss's motivation for abandoning his life as the female Josephine. I also regret not witnessing more of Joss's mother's encounter with the adopted son, Colman. The book, though, is not an argument for transvestitism nor is it an apology, nothing so crude. The book is more a celebration, a song for that intangible in the human spirit that makes us feel we have experienced a unique relationship in knowing a particular individual. We are not presented with analysis of these experiences but, rather, the author plays each character's reflections much as Joss played his music. Indeed, Joss, though dead, is still very much alive not only in his recordings but also within those he loved. We too experience him/her in the sublime "Music" chapter where the soul of the novel and the soul of Joss meet in a poetic nexus.

By the end of the book, we have come to know Joss and his/her affect on people but s/he remains an enigma. The newspaper hack attempting to ghost-write Colman's "official biography" of Joss would doubtless produce a conclusive character portrait confidently separating appearance from reality and yet be a million miles from the truth. Kay instead leaves all judgements up to the reader who through her sensitive rendering feel not an impulse to judge but rather a reason to grieve.

Jackie Kay, Trumpet
I am amased that this book isn't more well-known (I had trouble finding it in most bookstores) because it is a brilliant read. I had to read it for my women's module and it was far from a chore. I loved all the narrators of this book and particularly felt sorry for Mrs Moody and her son. It only took me 3 days to read it because it was that good. It is impossible to put down. It deals with the issues of love, death, anger and identity crisis with ease. I recommend it to everyone.

A moving, funny and occasionally horrifying novel.
The extraordinary life of a jazz trumpeter, Joss (born Josephine) Moody, who lived and played as a man. The story is told by a series of voices after Joss's death, including 'his' grieving widow and angry foster-son. Jackie Kay brings out the black humour of gender confusion, while gently suggesting that genius and love are just that, no matter how bizarre the circumstances. Beautifully written (the author is a poet) - but never precious.