This isn’t a spoiler, it’s the premise, so, excitable ones, settle: famous trumpet player Joss Moody dies – and everyone discovers all this time HE’S really a SHE called Josephine Moore whaaaat!!!
Yeah, whatever.
Jackie Kay’s immensely tedious novel Trumpet is about gender and other lofty and utterly dreary things. It wasn’t published all that long ago – 1998 – but its central conceit of the shock of discovering that someone lived their life as someone of the opposite sex doesn’t seem at all shocking today in the age of 23989 genders, Caitlyn Jenner, etc. Every time a character expressed surprise that Joss Moody was a girl, I kept thinking “So. What.”
There’s a feeble attempt at a story – the journo Sophie wants to write a salacious potential bestseller on Moody and is using Joss’ adopted son Colman as her way of gathering information – but the lack of a plot is fine as this is meant to be a character study. Or something – I guess? But it’s not a terribly good study of any character.
The titular character’s motivations for changing sex aren’t exactly clear beyond the obvious: she was gay at a time when you couldn’t openly be that way so she chose to wear a disguise. The other characters are a dull bunch: the one-dimensional wife Millie, the spoilt brat of a brainless son Colman, the money-hungry Sophie, Joss’ doting old ma Edith – none are the least bit compelling to read about nor display any characteristics to stand out.
Colman has a predictable and very small arc (anger then acceptance) while most everyone putters about repeating their surprise that Joss Moody was a woman, over and bloody over again – it’s such a boring and pointless book! Here’s what I learned from the characters’ reactions upon discovering someone they thought they knew well was a different gender: they were surprised. What an imaginative take. Colour me unsurprised that a prize-winning, blatantly Literary novel turned out to be utterly overrated tripe!
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