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triskellianNext book review: Trumpet, by Jackie Kay.
Trumpet tells of the aftermath of the death of Joss Moody, famous jazz man. Except he turns out in death to have been a woman all along. His wife knew, but no one else did: not his adopted son, not his mother (his mother, of course, knew he was a woman, but not that he'd become a man), not his friends and band members. The jazz world is in shock, and people who knew him are pursued by journalists trying to get to the bottom of the mystery. The reader, too, wants to somehow get inside his head, to find out why, and how, and what was it like, but we're not allowed to. Joss Moody is dead, so all we can have of him are pictures, other people's memories, and a letter left for his son. None of these really answer the questions we have, but it doesn't seem to matter.
The book is mostly told through the voices of Moody's wife and son, with interjections from others: a hostile journalist researching a book on Moody, his mother, a band member, and an old school friend. The changing voices can be confusing (especially in the case of the journalist, who often refers to herself in the third person), but the patchwork effect they build up works very well, giving us glimpses of the man without letting us meet him, and mirroring the loss felt by Moody's widow in the inability of the reader to capture something of the essence of the man.
Notice I'm not, after all, having pronoun problems here. Joss Moody emerges from Trumpet as a man. To refer to him as 'her' is unthinkable. Even with the memories of people who knew him as a girl, even with photographs of the jazz man as a girl-child in a dress, Moody is still 'he'.
Trumpet tells of the aftermath of the death of Joss Moody, famous jazz man. Except he turns out in death to have been a woman all along. His wife knew, but no one else did: not his adopted son, not his mother (his mother, of course, knew he was a woman, but not that he'd become a man), not his friends and band members. The jazz world is in shock, and people who knew him are pursued by journalists trying to get to the bottom of the mystery. The reader, too, wants to somehow get inside his head, to find out why, and how, and what was it like, but we're not allowed to. Joss Moody is dead, so all we can have of him are pictures, other people's memories, and a letter left for his son. None of these really answer the questions we have, but it doesn't seem to matter.
The book is mostly told through the voices of Moody's wife and son, with interjections from others: a hostile journalist researching a book on Moody, his mother, a band member, and an old school friend. The changing voices can be confusing (especially in the case of the journalist, who often refers to herself in the third person), but the patchwork effect they build up works very well, giving us glimpses of the man without letting us meet him, and mirroring the loss felt by Moody's widow in the inability of the reader to capture something of the essence of the man.
Notice I'm not, after all, having pronoun problems here. Joss Moody emerges from Trumpet as a man. To refer to him as 'her' is unthinkable. Even with the memories of people who knew him as a girl, even with photographs of the jazz man as a girl-child in a dress, Moody is still 'he'.
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Date: 2003-07-30 12:35 am (UTC)After you wrote your original edit on that topic I did find - thinking about such issues - that whatever I might consider to be the correct pronoun to use in various situations, internally I always classify anyone with any kind of gender ambiguity as male.