Coming Through Slaughter - Michael Ondaatje

 COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER -

MICHAEL ONDAATJE

So, this is the story of Buddy Bolden, regarded by jazz aficionados as being the father of jazz or to be more precise: the inventor of the music that became jazz. Even more than this, however, it's the story of a man who became a legend after spinning away into madness.

You don't have to be weird to be wired, as Mark E Smith once said, and Buddy Bolden was proof of that. During the day he cut hair in a barber shop and lived very happily with the mother of his daughter whom he loved very much. At night, however, he was the best, the loudest and the most loved cornet player in New Orleans and in the downtown world of bars, prostitutes and after-dark streetlife was where he became lost in music.

Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje is the story of crossing a metaphorical bridge and then burning it. It's the story of Icarus. Reaching for the sun but then falling. It's the story of crying for the moon as Syd Barrett would do years later - with the same results. 

Syd Barrett's fall, as we know, inspired Pink Floyd's Shine On You Crazy Diamond and likewise one single line - 'Buddy Bolden who became a legend when he went berserk in a parade' - inspired Michael Ondaatje to write this book.

The parade referred to was the annual procession of brass bands held in Louisiana in 1907. Two years prior to that, Bolden had gone off on a short tour with his band but then failed to return home. Instead, after living on the street for a while he moved in with a woman whom he'd met and fallen in love with during that tour. The fact that she was married and lived with her husband being of no consequence. Bolden simply turned his back on his family, his fame, his music - his whole life - and entered into a three-way relationship and to all intent and purpose, near-vanished from the world.

Something happened to Bolden on that tour to make him never want to see anybody he knew ever again. Two years later, however, an old friend of his had tracked him down and had persuaded him to go back home and return to his family and to his music, with the annual parade to be his first return performance.

It was on that parade that Bolden 'went berserk', pouring himself into his cornet playing to such an extent that the blood vessels in his neck burst. From this incident it was then just a short hop, skip and a jump to Bolden being detained in an insane asylum where he there spent the rest of his life.

There are echoes here not only of Syd Barrett but also of Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain, Peter Green, and Brian Wilson. All iconic musicians who in one way or another went mad. Like theirs, Bolden's is an equally interesting story though there are in actual fact very slim pickings to be rummaged through in regard to his life both private and public. Two obvious examples of this being that there is just one single photograph of Bolden in existence and no known recordings of him actually playing, so everything known and said about him is mostly through word of mouth.

Whether this lack of information presented a problem or a gift to Michael Ondaatje when writing his book is academic because what he's wrought from it is a work of art in itself. Coming Through Slaughter reads like one of those dreams that you wake up from and then try to get back into when falling asleep again. You usually fail and the dream is left cut off without any ending or resolution and therefore no meaning. Except that with Ondaatje's book there's a constant feeling of successfully re-entering a dream and being able to follow it through to some sort of conclusion. What this tells us is that Michael Ondaatje is a very, very good writer with the heart and mind of a natural poet. Weaving words and forming sentences that shouldn't make any sense at all but overall and put into context do - just like they might in a dream.

So yes, Coming Through Slaughter is dream-like and reads very much like a sad but extremely beautiful, fully-realized, perfectly comprehensible dream that will linger a long time after its ending.

John Serpico

The Collected Works Of Billy The Kid - Michael Ondaatje

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF

BILLY THE KID -

MICHAEL ONDAATJE

A strange book. An anomaly. An unusual book. Written by Michael Ondaatje, better known as being the author of The English Patient, made into the film starring Ralph Fiennes. The Collected Works Of Billy The Kid is bricolage, a make-believe scrapbook of both the real and imagined. It's not quite just a book, however, it's more akin to a work of art; carefully thought-out and even more carefully composed, putting lay-out and design centre stage alongside the actual words. And what words they are, what beautiful turns of phrases. They are words of a poet, from the point of view of Billy The Kid who has 'seen pictures of great stars, drawings which show them straining to the centre that would explode their white if temperature and the speed they moved at shifted one degree.'

The only education Billy The Kid has had is that from violence of which the lessons have been many. He's been hot-housed in them from a very early age so acutely, so intensely that he's able to describe a man being shot in the head in the same way a scholar might describe a Cezanne. Unlike the well-educated connoisseurs of art, however, Billy is blessed with a sense of humour that's almost genius: 'When Charlie Bowdre married Manuela, we carried them on our shoulders, us on horses. Took them to the Shea Hotel, 8 rooms. Jack Shea at the desk said Charlie - everythings on the house, we'll give you the Bridal. No, no, says Charlie, dont bother, I'll hang onto her ears until I get used to it. HAWHAWHAW.'

Michael Ondaatje paints Billy The Kid as an Arthur Rimbaud-type figure, forever chasing a fugitive vision realised on occasion by such things as the sight of nature in the raw and sunlight beams in dusty dwellings. Describing himself as having a 'floating barracuda in the brain', Billy has a world-weariness about him that is at odds with one so young but then there aren't many others of a similar age who has a one-time friend called Pat Garrett on their tail.

'They say Pat Garrett's got your number,' as Bob Dylan once put it 'so sleep with one eye open when you slumber. Billy, they don't like you to be so free.'

So is Pat Garrett a Paul Verlaine to Billy The Kid's Rimbaud? The answer to that is 'Yes', or even a 'Oui, monsieur', particularly after being informed of how at the age of 15 Garrett had taught himself French but never told anyone about it and never spoke to anyone in French for the next 40 years. Garrett was 'an academic murderer', a 'sane assassin with a mind full of French he never used.' Apparently he was also 'frightened of flowers because they grew so slowly that he couldn't tell what they planned to do. His mind learned to be superior because of the excessive mistakes of those around him. Flowers watched him.' As in Baudelaire's Flowers Of Evil?

Did Billy The Kid ever stand a chance against such a man? Well, he stood a better chance than most but in the end only one could live and only one could end up in Boot Hill. Only one could end up with 'blood planets in his head', a 'fish stare', and buried still in handcuffs and leg irons. And of course, it was Billy The Kid, although like conjoined twins both he and Pat Garrett would pass into legend.

The Collected Works Of Billy The Kid is indeed a strange book. An anomaly. An unusual book. A thing of strange beauty.

John Serpico