Fateful encounters

Two hundred years ago, " Zambawi", Africa. A young villager is captured by a slave trader and ends up being sold in New Orleans market. Some 10 decades on, we meet Fortis "Lick" Holden, a formidable jazz cornet player, born into a poor, over-peopled black family in turn-of-the-century Louisiana. A century later, a "coffee-coloured woman" - a middle-aged, though still elegant, "retired" prostitute - sits in Heathrow airport awaiting a flight to New York. In ways both outlandish and absolutely true to the often bizarre nature of real life, all are intimately connected.

Patrick Neate's second novel Twelve Bar Blues - which has just won the Whitbread Novel Award - is a sprawling, raucous tale spanning two centuries. It is a formidable work of imagination and research, digging deep into the lives of African chieftains, New Orleans prostitutes and the musical heritage of the Deep South. None of the lives here is exempt from suffering: Lick is nursed as an infant by his 15-year-old sister, Cheese, whose own child, Jesus, died at the age of just two days. Later, when Lick's own wife - a former hooker - learns that she is pregnant, she is so furious that she takes a knife to his face. He never meets his son.

The action is episodic, and the connections between the stories become clear only gradually. Slowly, links emerge between the slave boy of 1790, Lick in 1920, and the poised figure of Sylvia di Napoli as she leaves for America in 1998 to find out "who she is". It is a story, then, at least in part, about genealogy, about people's search for their roots. But it is, above all, a novel which speaks of the power of stories themselves, of their ability to transfix and change us.

There is a strong sense, too, in which many of the characters knowingly inhabit the narrative of their own lives. Sylvia and Jim - the young Englishman she meets on the plane who becomes as obsessed as she with her mission to find her roots - spend much of their time telling each other stories. They stay up late drinking "Nigerian Guinness" (Jim's favourite: Guinness with a dash of blackcurrant) in Irish bars in Manhattan while they reinvent themselves to each other. "Stories," Neate reflects, "need to be aired to survive."

Something of an Ancient Mariner compulsion, then, drives this book and, like the best storytellers, Neate has his obsessions: music, the lives of prostitutes, Africa, jazz. He relishes the multicultural hotpot that is modern metropolitan life: "In America, pubs were Irish as surely as Koreans owned cornershops and McDonald's employed Mexicans." And he thrills to the potential of fictional invention: Lick, he writes, once spent a month as a young man playing jazz with the great Louis "Satchelmouth" Armstrong, "but history most likely never heard it and certainly never recorded it or wrote it down".

The hardiest of all his characters, though, is "Fate". Fate, which Neate's human protagonists appear to accept as the driving force in their lives, is seen as capricious, untrustworthy, yet not without a sense of humour. And here the influence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez is tangible, with a dash of Jonathan Coe and Louis de Bernieres thrown in for good measure.

"It's a hard, shitty world full of hard folk that you wouldn't piss on in a fire," says Lick's best friend. And at the end, Neate writes: "Fate spins its patterns like a spider spins its web." He wouldn't, one senses, have it any other way.