Slightly Foxed No 3 Autumn 2004

Johnny de Falbe

Editions

Review

This issue contains an article by Johnny about Colum McCann's Dancer hbk £12.99pbk £6.99. Here is the text:

It is no accident that chain booksellers are piled high with the latest products of well-known writers and those with a ‘hook’ (drug addict/victim/celebrity/murderer).  Such books sell themselves: a branch’s stock reflects corporate policy, publishers’ marketing initiatives and media exposure; a shopkeeper neither expects nor is expected to offer opinions of his own.  As an independent bookseller, I am temperamentally inclined to push books that chain bookshops have missed.  My customers probably don’t need to know what I think of the new Martin Amis or Anne Tyler before deciding whether to buy it, and if they haven’t already made up their minds then they may prefer to be directed elsewhere.  But where? They are fed up of hype, uncertain of reviews…  If they have a relationship with a bookseller then they might welcome a steer.

Identifying which books to go dizzy about is often haphazard.  It can’t be done for more than two or three books a year or you find yourself wallowing in superlatives and you’re no help to anyone.  At John Sandoe’s, our main criterion is that we have liked a book, and that we know why.  The qualification is important not just so that we can justify a recommendation but also so that we know who not to recommend the book to: responding to someone else’s taste is easier with some understanding of one’s own.  Sometimes books that we have sold strongly from the start have in due course become bestsellers.  Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour pbk £7.99 is an example, likewise Salley Vickers’s Miss Garnet’s Angel.  We actively sold W.G.Sebald’s The Emigrants pbk £7.99 when it first appeared, and I remember buying 100 copies of his Vertigo pbk £7.99 on its publication.  Of course I am pleased when such a book, or author, starts being talked about by everyone else, but I must also admit to a ridiculous sense of possessiveness: I remain unreasonably fond of those that, so far as I am aware, have made no impact on the wider world.  A few years ago there was Kalimantaan pbk £7.99 by C.S.Godschalk, a powerful and sinister novel about Rajah Brooke of North Borneo, written from his wife’s point of view.  Petrie Harbouri’s The Brothers Carburi hbk £16.99 was another success: it is a subtle portrayal of the relationships between three brothers from Cephalonia in the late eighteenth century, based on letters.  One went to be physician to the king of France, one was a chemist in Padua, one moved to St Petersburg where he became an engineer and was responsible for moving a colossal rock from the Finnish marshes to be the plinth for Falconet’s statue of the Bronze Horseman.  The book is held in perfect balance by the old mother in Cephalonia.  The style is mannered, which will put some people off, but that is also what makes it work so well.  And how would I feel if my two favourite English authors, Robert Edric and C.K. Stead (actually a New Zealander) became bestsellers?  I would not stop trying to sell their books, but my meagre efforts would make more difference to someone else.

No book has exposed my own double standard to me more clearly than Dancer by Colum McCann, which I read in proof in December 2002.  It 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.  In Leningrad we meet Anna’s daughter, who is a kind of mentor to him but understands too that she is outstripped by him; Rosa Maria, a Chilean dance student; his new dance teacher…  And all of a sudden, just as he has become a star at the Kirov, he is gone.  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 individual characters are magnificently convincing.  My favourites are Tom, the man who makes his shoes in London, who ‘just by the sketches alone…intuits the life of this foot, raised in barefoot poverty…’; and his antithesis, 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.

We sold Dancer very well throughout 2003 and our enthusiasm was justified by customer’s responses to it.  (A sister of mine who came to stay read it all night.  When my mother was staying lately, I took her a cup of tea in the morning and found her in floods of tears, frantic to read as much as possible before going off to Gatwick.)  More than with any book I can remember, I was mystified when Dancer did not appear on the Booker or Whitbread shortlists last year.  Even now I wonder if there is some reason, unknown to me, for which it was ineligible.  I gather that it has generally done quite well and I am very pleased about that, because it ought.  And yet – here is my double standard – I wonder if I would start feeling cooler towards it if it had been rewarded by a big prize?  The answer, I think, is that I would stop wanting to tell people about it because it would be in a publicity machine where independent booksellers have no place.  But I would not alter my belief that it is a masterpiece. - review by Johnny de Falbe