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DancerEditions
ReviewDancer is a fictional portrait of Rudolf Nureyev, told from many angles in many different voices. It opens with one of the best short evocations of battle that I have ever read, as Russian soldiers return from the front at the end of the Second World War. The picture narrows to an industrial town in remote Russia where a boy watches the trains come in, waiting for his father. Then we see him being handed through a hospital window to perform folk dances for the wounded; he is a prodigy, who makes even the human wrecks drinking methylated spirits from vats draw breath. McCann gives no preamble when he switches voice: a new section begins and the reader has to work out that the main character is the woman in the bath house, Rudi’s teacher Anna’s husband (a dignified old political exile), his mother, his father. One gets the hang of it very quickly and the effect is to give the reader brilliant glimpses of Nureyev as he cuts across other people’s lives, never caught and always dazzling. One of the strokes I admire most in this novel is an absence. No direct reference is made to Nureyev’s defection, his celebrated leap. It is simply not there. After a description of Nureyev eyeing up men in a Leningrad street late at night, a new section begins in London, where he lives and moves just as fast. This has the prosaic effect of showing how utterly uninterested in politics Nureyev was, and the more important poetic effect of recreating the leap in a different medium. It is more important because we could read about his politics, or lack of them, in a biography, but the point of a novel must be to give a sense of what it would feel like to be such a man. The other characters are magnificently convincing too. Fonteyn of course; Tom, who makes Nureyev’s shoes in London… and Victor, who takes us on a tour of New York on a night when he has arranged a party for Rudi. One reviewer remarked that you feel as if you need a bath after reading this section. It is filthy, and it is stupendously vivid. Here is Victor walking down the street: ‘…making walking into a sort of dancing, beginning in the shoulders with a symmetrical roll not even the blacks have perfected, one oblong shrug of a shoulder and then the other, as if connected by synaptical cogs, first the left and then the right, but not just the shoulders, the roll moves down into his chest, into his ribcage, through the rest of his body, down to his toes – God made me so short so I can blow basketball players without ruining my knees! – then up again to rest for a moment in his hops, nothing flagrant, no need to bring attention, the walk alone pays homage to his crotch,…’ The prose is Victor’s walk. And while each of the many characters is vividly rendered through their particular voice, the cumulative effect on the reader of McCann’s versatility, rigour and energy is to reflect Nureyev’s own genius. Nowhere is this more apparent than when McCann is writing about dance: his sensitivity to the discipline’s physical demands and the artistic standards shared by Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn generate a powerful sense of their relationship. Whatever his immediate subject – Rudi at school in Ufa, dancing, Tom making shoes, Victor in the baths in New York – McCann’s commitment to detail is passionate and exact; and the reader transfers this quality to Nureyev himself. It is partly that we appreciate something of Nureyev by seeing what he valued in other people, but also that the intensity of McCann’s gaze, his hunger for perfection and vitality, seems to have its source in Nureyev himself. It is this remarkable artistic trick that makes the novel such an astonishing portrait of an artist, and because it seems so true it is immensely moving. - from a piece in Slightly Foxed #3, Autumn 2004 - review by Johnny de Falbe |
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