‘A lesson in what jealousy’ll do to a man’

Half-Blood Blues (Canadian Classics Edition)
by Esi Edugyan

Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2026
$24.99 / 9781443478731

Reviewed by Selena Mercuri

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Half-Blood Blues, Greater Victoria Area author Esi Edugyan’s second novel, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Orange Prize, and later received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Its reissue in the HarperCollins Canadian Classics series is an occasion to ask why the novel has held up as well as it has. Part of the answer, perhaps, is that Edugyan’s protagonist embodies unreliability as a disposition—he is a man who has been lying to himself for fifty years about what he did on a Paris street in 1940, and who tells his story in such a particular voice of evasion, that the novel’s formal and psychological concerns reinforce one another.

The novel takes place in Paris 1940, while German troops are days away from the city. A jazz band has taken refuge in the apartment of Delilah, a woman from Montreal with connections to Louis Armstrong. There are four of them: Delilah, Chip Jones, the trumpeter Hieronymus Falk (Hiero), and the novel’s narrator, Sidney Griffiths (Sid). They talk, Sid tells us, “like mongrels, see—half German, half Baltimore bar slang. Just a few scraps of French between us.” They drink cheap wine called rot, which “stay[s] like nails in your gut” and leaves the skin smelling of rancid vinegar. They play music. Mostly, they wait.

Hiero is twenty years old, extraordinarily gifted, German-born, and Black. Under Nazi racial classification, he is a Mischling, a half breed, his mother a white Rhinelander, his father absent. He carries no identity papers. Edugyan describes him as “so dark no soul ever like to guess his mama a white Rhinelander,” which means that whatever provisional tolerance the regime extended to some Black people, especially Americans with documents, does not apply to him.

Sid’s situation is different. He is the son of two Baltimore quadroons, “straight-haired, green-eyed,” and light enough that people routinely take him for white. His American citizenship gives him papers.

Catastrophe arrives when Hiero and Sid go out to a diner to get milk at Hiero’s insistence. Sid returns from the bathroom to find Hiero being taken away by Gestapo officers. What exactly Sid does, or fails to do, in that moment is the question the novel hinges on.

The other timeline is 1992 in Baltimore. Sid is in his eighties, living alone after several failed marriages. His most recent wife, Lola, died five years after their wedding. Chip, also in his eighties, comes to visit; they are travelling to Berlin to attend the premiere of a documentary made in Hiero’s honour. The common understanding is that Hiero died sometime after being liberated from Mauthausen, an Austrian work camp: “Except no one knows how, or when, or where. Hell there wasn’t even a grave.” 

While visiting, Chip tells Sid that Hiero is alive. He is living in northern Poland under a different name and has sent Chip two letters. Sid does not believe him. Chip suggests that they go find Hiero in Poland after the documentary screening, but Sid is resistant to this idea at first.

On the way to the airport, the cab driver starts asking Sid questions, such as where he lives. Sid, who lies reflexively, says London. The driver takes this to mean England, but Sid clarifies that he means Ontario. Sid observes that “the cabbie’s eyes sort of glazed over. Canada kills any conversation quick, I learned long ago. It’s a little trick of mine.” It is one of the novel’s funnier sections.

Sid and Chip are in the audience at the documentary screening. Chip has given an interview to the filmmakers, and in it he names Sid. The passage is worth quoting in full: 

A lesson in what jealousy’ll do to a man. To betray such a genius musician, and a kid at that, over a woman. Over the kid’s talents, and over a woman. I mean, there he stood, denying his friend, pretending he didn’t even know him, while they dragged the poor boy away… It’s a crime for which Sid ain’t never been held to account.

This is Chip, Sid’s oldest friend, the man Sid describes as “a weakness for me, even seventy years later. I ain’t a stupid man, no more than most. And he ain’t that damn charming. But it seems we is friends to the last.” Sid goes on to describe Chip as a habitual liar and unreliable person, even citing examples from when they first met in childhood. As the novel progresses, the irony in this is revealed—Sid is just as, if not more, unreliable than Chip. He has had his equal share of lies. The friendship between them is perhaps the novel’s most interesting relationship because these two characters who know each other’s worst traits still choose to remain in close proximity to one another.

Louis Armstrong makes several appearances throughout the novel as he sees Hiero’s musical potential and invites the band to record with him. Sid recalls his first impression of Armstrong: “A man ain’t never seen greatness till he set eyes on the likes of Louis Armstrong. That the truth. Those hooded lids, that blinding smile: the jack was immense, majestic. But something else, too: he looked brutally human, like he known suffering on its own terms.” The potential that Armstrong sees in Hiero is one of the main points of envy for Sid. Unlike the rest of the band, Sid is not invited to participate in the recording with Armstrong after failing to impress him during practice.

Another point of envy for Sid stems from his feelings for Delilah, who is also presumably romantically involved with Armstrong. Sid and Delilah engage in an on-again off-again relationship, but Sid is often jealous of the attention and care that Delilah gives to Hiero. Edugyan is also very good on the moral ugliness of comparison. Sid does not hate Hiero in any simple way. He admires him, wants to protect him, resents him, envies him, and needs him.

The dual timeline is the novel’s structural spine, and Edugyan handles the movement between 1940 Paris and 1992 Baltimore and Berlin with intention; the past illuminates the present, and the present reframes the past. Sid has spent fifty years carrying the knowledge of what he did or did not do, and the documentary forces the question back into the open. Sid is not a reliable narrator in the conventional sense, but he is a convincingly human one.

One of the greatest pleasures of Half-Blood Blues is the central role of jazz and pure chance throughout. Music is the novel’s language of freedom, rivalry, intimacy, and historical survival. The characters may be pushed to the margins of Europe by fascism and racism, but when they play, they briefly escape oppression. The band becomes famous because of a record that was smuggled out from their practice days after Louis Armstrong’s departure during the occupation, at a time when Hiero is leading all their recording sessions. Hiero is a perfectionist and insists on destroying any records that aren’t perfect, but Sid hides one in his instrument case. If it weren’t for that minor decision all those years ago, many of the succeeding events would not have come to pass.

The Canadian Classics edition is well-produced, and celebrates an important and compelling Canadian text, though it arrives without a critical introduction or any contextual apparatus to differentiate it from earlier editions. A short prefatory essay would have been welcome. The novel’s title hints at the instability throughout. “Half-blood” is a racial category imposed by a violent and oppressive regime, but the book is also interested in all the half-truths, half-confessions, and half-friendships that structure Sid’s life. Like the music throughout, these forms of incompleteness are improvised, damaged, beautiful, and haunted. Half-Blood Blues understands that history, more than anything, is made out of what people cannot quite admit, even to themselves.

Selena Mercuri is Reviews Editor at The New Quarterly, a publicist at River Street, and a social media associate at The Rights Factory. Her writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Literary Review of Canada, Prairie Fire, and The Ampersand Review, among others. She received the 2023 Norma Epstein Foundation Award for Creative Writing and is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. Find her on Instagram: @selenamercuriwriter. [Editor’s note: Selena has reviewed books by Claire Sicherman and Nicole Breit, JJ Lee (ed.), Shani Mootoo, Sarah Louise Butler and Diana Stevan for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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