When Paul Auster wrote City of Glass or Evelyn Waugh started work on Men at Arms, did they know it was the beginning of that long haul that makes a trilogy?
Patrick Neate certainly didn’t when he wrote his first novel Musungu Jim and the Great Chief Tuloko: I remember so well reading it when it first came to Penguin in 1999, and thinking what a fantastic young talent, and how we must, must buy his book. All of Patrick’s themes that would recur throughout the trilogy which also includes Twelve Bar Blues, and now Jerusalem, are there in that book – the funny well-timed satire, the controlled fury and political astuteness of a British novelist writing about colonialism and its aftermath; the themes of culture, myth and music; oh, and the great jokes about farting…but the endearing thing, re-reading that book now, is that they are clearly written by a younger writer than the one writing Jerusalem.
Since that first book, we have published Patrick in paperback and hardback and trade paperback. He has always been fun to work with – and it was odd to discover quite far into our editorial relationship that there’s also another bond: we both read Social Anthropology at the same university in the same faculty, albeit years apart. Sometimes he and I have had long bouts of editorial fighting, sometimes not. He’s written two other novels outside the trilogy in between books 1 & 2; he’s won the Whitbread Novel Award for Twelve Bar Blues; he’s built a house in Zimbabwe; he got married; he reviews film; he started and still runs the best evening writers’ event anywhere (the totally brilliant Bookslam); and now he’s even having a baby…
So I feel a sense of aging melancholy now that this trilogy is done. It’s been thrilling to watch how his writing has changed; and hasn’t at all – all three of those books are inimitably Patrick, and also inimitably
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