The impact of public events on private lives: this is one of Sophia Hillan’s themes. Her novel opens in Belfast in the summer of 1995, with the ceasefires getting under way. Ruth Deacon, academic and organiser of a major literary conference in the city, is grappling with insurmountable anxieties: impossible husband, unamiable dependant, uncertain prospects (the word “restructuring is sounded ominously in university quarters). A stroke of luck – or is it? – brings to her attention the papers of her one-time English teacher, Edith Barratt, among them a handwritten “memory book”. Edith’s narrative forms a story within Ruth’s story, and between the two of them a few vast segments of 20th-century history get rehearsed.
Edith, born in 1915, meets a young German called Paul Herrold, who has suffered an accident while visiting Belfast. It’s 1932. Six years later, she meets him again in Rome, as a kind of Dance-to-the-Music-of-Time rotation comes into play. The dance motif, indeed, has a particular resonance for this novel, standing for lightness and rapture, while the lives of its characters are weighed down with all manner of daily concerns and discontents – before horror, darkness and devastation enter in.
Wars and rumours of wars, both local and international, are in the offing. In the summer of 1938, Edith is travelling through Europe, initially with a friend from Belfast, Kitty Brown. Reaching Berlin, she registers its air of expectation, its inauspicious undercurrents. It’s a place of allure and alarms, and also the place where, on an enchanted evening, Paul Herrold takes her dancing at Clarchen’s Ballhaus, and thereby creates the high point of her life. Everything else is a falling away from this moment.
The following year, back in Berlin accompanied by a platonic friend and colleague William Hamilton, Edith catches a glimpse of Hitler himself in full regalia – but not, this time, of Paul.
Kitty Brown, whose habit of disappearing makes her an unreliable travelling companion, soon exits from Edith’s life altogether. Unreliability is another of the threads running through the book. Few among its characters can be relied on to act or react appropriately. Edith Barratt may or may not fall into the “unreliable narrator” category herself when it comes to her reminiscences. (The epigraph from Jane Austen alerts us to this possibility straight away.) It is up to Ruth Deacon, herself the author of a book about unreliable narrators, to disentangle actuality and illusion, to make sense of anomalies and arrive at a resolution.
In the meantime, the narrative moves backwards and forwards, taking in different eras and exigencies. Nazi Germany, the Eucharistic Congress, Fred Astaire, Auschwitz, the Kindertransport, the Phoney War, the real war, the aftermath of the war, The Third Man, IRA activity, Sam Thompson's Over the Bridge, civil rights, literary developments in the North, CS Lewis, writing for children, the Troubles, the Abercorn Restaurant bombing, Drumcress – all the loaded designations warrant a reference at one point or another. Sometimes the sheer abundance of material can seem overwhelming. One minute immersed in the atmosphere generated by a German crowd chanting "Heil, Heil", the next you're transported to a shingle beach in Co Down with the novelist and short-story writer Michael McLaverty walking along it.
However, the individual sections are vivid and compelling. There is, for example, a brilliant evocation of the Blitz on Belfast: the sense of panic and dislocation, the crypt of Clonard Monastery turned into a place of refuge, and unidentified casualties laid out in St George’s Market and the Falls Road swimming baths. The progress of Edith Barratt’s career as a minor literary figure is well delineated.
There are a couple of surprises towards the end of The Way We Danced, and a number of lively encounters. Allusions continue to proliferate – Kate O'Brien, Parnell, Yeats, Camus, Heaney, Philip Hobsbaum's Group in Belfast, Queen Maeve – but all of the novel's multiplicity of connections and reflections are handled with subtlety and skill.
Patricia Craig's latest book is Bookworm: a Memoir of Childhood Reading (Somerville Press)
