Come Dance With Me

Russell Hoban

Editions

Review

Early on in this novel, Christabel Alderton describes leafing through a book (of Wallace Stevens poems): ‘page after page grabbed me with ideas and images I never would have thought of…’  Exactly the same might be said of a novel by Russell Hoban.  Where else would we find a character with a T-shirt saying ‘Anapaests For Peace’, or a remark like ‘We always have a moment with Anubis before we start work’?  Every page Hoban has published, including his children’s books, contains these oddities, and they are distinctively, strikingly, his.

Their charm and force derives from their perfect expression and also from their conjunction with the humdrum.  In this novel, Christabel is a forty-something singer with a heavy rock band called Mobile Mortuary.  Elias is a doctor in his late fifties who specialises in diabetes.  They meet in front of a painting by Odilon Redon in the Royal Academy, and they spend the whole novel wondering whether to allow themselves to fall in love with one another.  The main obstruction is Christabel’s past, which is cluttered with so many dead men that she is convinced she brings bad luck.  Chief among these ghosts is that of her four-year-old son Django, who fell off a cliff in Hawaii when they went to look at hump-backed whales.

If you strip away the kookiness from Hoban’s work, what are you left with?  The question is of course absurd: form and style are inseparable from the content.  The kookiness is a form of alertness to influence and connection, which reflects a constant quest for meaning.  It is a recognition that artistic experience, however informal, helps us to accommodate loss.  And loss, says Rudy, the Hawaian guide in Come Dance With Me ‘is the only game in town…  Anybody says different don’t know what’s what.’  This awareness of loss and the past soaks Hoban’s work, and alongside it runs the need felt by apparently ordinary people to get round it.

A grey February day can only be brightened by a new outing in Hoban-land.  Here are the bats and the owls and the references to the work of Redon and so forth.  Here is the humour, the fertile language and the inimitable kookiness by which all of Hoban’s work is distinguished.  Walk-on parts from earlier previous characters, including Peter Diggs and Amaryllis (‘Trust me, I’m a weirdo’), are like great bunches of flowers presented to faithful readers. - review by Johnny de Falbe