Twelve Bar Blues by Patrick Neate

I have just finished reading Twelve Bar Blues by Patrick Neate.

It is three stories in one - the experiences of a black jazz player in Louisiana in the early twentieth century; the experiences of a prostitute/jazz singer in 1990s London; the interactions among tribal figures in rural 1990s Zimbabwe.

It is an impressive novel, although it assumed a liberal outlook and a liking for jazz.

The misery sequences I thought were overdone. 

The prose style often adopted the tone of a cautionary tale - as if the book were being read aloud by Morgan Freeman. 

Patrick Neate obviously knows nothing about archaeology and failed to research even the basics.

Often his characters express a cod ideology of blackness and jazz.  As Patrick Neate is not black his projection of these ideas onto black characters is dubious.  How can Patrick Neate know what it is like to be black?

Often there is meaningless twaddle:  "The truth is that fate is both as crude and as subtle as a key change in music or the twists in a narrative.  And the truth is where you want to see it, so long as you've got enough moral energy or enough moral despair to get up and go looking."

The n-word is on every other page of this novel.  Obviously Patrick Neate is a liberal and presumably is using the n-word ironically.  But nevertheless it did seem gratuitous.