Sex, jazz, race relations, cross dressing, madness, death—there’s a lot going on in Mandy Sayer’s latest novel, set in wartime Sydney and New Guinea and it comes delivered in a fast moving narrative. Love in the Years of Lunacy tells the story of Pearl, an acclaimed Sydney saxophonist whose jazz education has always been a bit of a mystery to jazz scholars. A year after her death, her nephew, a detective novelist with a touch of writers’ block, finds a hidden cache of cassette tapes. From them the voice of Pearl tells her story and reveals her secrets – along and a request that he write them up—‘making them pretty’.

What follows is a tale that will stretch credulity to breaking point if it’s not just abandoned from the start. Seventeen-year-old Pearl and her twin brother, Martin, offspring of an eccentric performing family, are both employed in big bands that play at the Trocedero, Sydney’s leading music venue. Already jazz fanatics, the war gives them the opportunity to meet and learn from US servicemen who really know how to play. When Pearl meets James Washington, an African-Americans jazz master, she falls for him musically, sexually and totally. He senses the doomed future of their relationship in a world of prejudice and war she sees only that they are in love and need to be together. When James abandons plans to elope and desert and is transferred to Queensland, Pearl attempts suicide, and comes under the treatment of the wonderfully named ‘Master of Lunacy’—a man so much taken by her that they become engaged after she is declared cured. Until Pearl hears that James is alive, and heading for New Guinea. By coincidence, Martin, who joined the army’s Entertainment Unit after his own girlfriend left him, has also been posted to New Guinea. And we all know what happens when twins resemble each other…

This is a tragic-comic romp with carnivalesque overtones and more than a touch of pathos, not social realism. Sydney nightlife shines and the vision of a mismatched band of army troubadours trekking through the jungles of New Guinea to a big band beat is particularly appealing, a counterpoint to the troubled love story. Pearl makes a vibrant central character, predictability is twisted by the odd surprise and the musical references provide a fine soundtrack. Mandy Sayer’s memoirs—Dreamtime Alice and Velocity—give some indication of her knowledge of and attraction to performers who live on the margins. Like Sayer’s other writing, this novel celebrates the entertainer and their world.