Sometimes great things come from unlikely combinations - Sweet and Sour, Laurel and Hardy, Lennon and McCartney, Beauty and the Beast, Sax and the Bear...sorry, run that last one past me again. The Bear Comes Home by Rafi Zabor is a book about a bear that plays the sax? You're kidding, right?
It shouldn't work. It damn near doesn't work sometimes. There are very occasionally some highly creative phrases and spellings but all are clear and perfectly understandable and that is surely the point of language. I just think it's written in jazz by which I mean the writing is in the same style as the music - sometimes slightly bonkers but full of energy and a sense of fun. It reads like a kind of brilliant improvisation between the characters where you are pushed to the edge of disbelief but everything is so realistically and thoroughly narrated that the fact that the basic premise is complete nonsense doesn't matter. It has a surreal and magical quality but is by no means a fairy tale about a cute cuddly type of child's anthropomorphism. The bear feels its wildness and that sense of power and menace is part of his character which makes him a misunderstood slightly grumpy outsider. A bit like a jazz musician then? Yes exactly. It captures what it is like to have a burning sense of an almost spiritual vision of his own nature and music and a fragile sense of being able to interpret it in live performance.
By the way its' a long book and has a number of fairly detailed musical expositions but don't let that put you off because it doesn't drag; it fizzes along and veers from semi-tragedy to joyous and exuberant humour.
Personally it led me to listening to a lot of referenced material by Sonny Rollins, Jackie McLean, Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and others, some of which I knew but much of which I could now listen to with a much greater empathy and appreciate the combination of restraint and wildness in it - the way that a tune would be taken and bent out of recognition. This is a fictional biography of a character that is so human and yet bent out of all recognition as a bear to come back and throw fresh light on what it is to be truly human. That's totally cool and that's Jazz.
