Title: Banjoman
First published: 2004
Description: The pull quote you expect to find on the back of a memoir is, “Reads like a novel.” Well here’s a switch —Banjoman, the novel, reads like a memoir —a memoir so gripping that is reads like a novel.
On the back cover Allan Francis Scott tells us, “This is not all fiction in fact all the characters are drawn from people I’ve met and interacted with in the UK and Germany. The fiction is in the linking of these participants to my story.”
And what a story. Scott has cleverly and modestly made himself, as the narrator, a charming second banana to the eponymous Banjoman. He’s in love with Banjoman’s wife, music and mystery and therefore, so are we. Banjoman’s real name is Jonathan Waddington–Flax and he is a bomber pilot who drops from the sky into the life of Greta, a nineteen year old German who is watching her Dresden burn.
All children of veterans know the damaged silence of a damaged father or mother who is trying to forget. Banjoman is lucky —he really can’t remember. Amnesia , is one of the oldest and best literary tricks known to writers, works perfectly here as part of the story and as a way to structure the telling. We get to hear multiple first-person narratives ranging from the complicated lives of jazz musicians, to young Greta’s life in astonishing detail, to some- seat- of the-pants flying with the pilot of a Lancaster.
I highly recommend it.
Gillian McEnaney.
Subjects: Growing up in the Nazi era, dixie jazz, flying a Lancaster, retrograde amnesia, the Vulcan bomber., Banjoists, Fiction
Places: Dresden, London, Nuremberg, Bournemouth, Hastings, Folkstone, Amesbury.
Time periods: 1935 to 1955