The protagonist of Coming Through Slaughter is Buddy Bolden, known chiefly to jazz aficionados as a pioneering musician in turn-of-the-century New Orleans. Bolden is a hazy, semi-mythological figure at the dawning of jazz—from the days before recordings or big money or national and international acceptance of Black music. (pp. 92-3)

From these fragments and an acquaintanceship with New Orleans and its history, Ondaatje has fashioned a prose work (his first) that is part documentary, part fiction and essentially a spiritual exegesis of a tragic personality. Upon finishing it, one no longer asks why Ondaatje chose Bolden as his principal character. He has journeyed so far into the world and mind of Bolden—or someone he imagines Bolden to have been—that Coming Through Slaughter represents an imaginative feat of a high order: a transcending of cultural and racial and historical barriers into a state of nearly total...