Book review: The Wonder

Published on Thursday 20 August 2009 17:41

The Wonder by Diana Evans Chatto & Windus, 314pp, £12.99

DIANA EVANS BRINGS A STYLE AND technique to The Wonder that enhance the reader's immediate pleasure, and it is sustained throughout by her flair for the colourful phrase, for attention to detail. The Wonder takes love and tests its limits; it takes identity and examines what it means to know who you are, and who you are not. It is, by turns, a slow-burn detective tale, a juggling act, a romance, and a secular parable – a warning against the foolishness of frittering one's talent.

The talent central to this story is that of Antoney Matheus, a natural dancer, brought to England from Jamaica by his mother during the murky 1950s.

There, in London, during the heady, experimental 1960s, when anything goes, Antoney stumbles upon a teacher and, in time, finds artistic expression – and passing grace – with a new black dance group, Midnight Ballet. The group is his world and its members quickly form a family of sorts – they row, they laugh, they sulk, they soar towards recognition and acclaim, while Antoney rules, and Simone, the queen bee, demands her own solo, desiring Antoney from afar, but remaining coupled to mood-swept Ekow, the company's rock.

Midnight Ballet breathes innovation, risk, panache. Its greatest champion is the critic, Edward Riley, a pivotal player in this story whose friendship with Antoney grows towards love (a private passion held only by Riley and never voiced). And he has a rival.

For it is Carla, one of the company, who captures Antoney's heart, and who later marries him in a flash of spontaneity while touring (a fairytale segment of the novel that pushes the limits of credibility with a castle and a baroness thrown in). Carla is carrying Antoney's child, a daughter Denise who is followed by Lucas, their only son, a few years later.

The novel opens on a narrowboat on the Thames where Denise and Lucas, now in their twenties, live alone. Their mother is dead, their father long gone – reported drowned. Thus, raised by their grandmother – Carla's mother, now also dead – they are resilient, but when Lucas discovers items of memorabilia in an old wardrobe, Midnight Ballet and the ghosts of the 1960s begin to flutter, and he is prompted to turn detective, first finding Simone, and then Edward Riley, Antoney's confidante, the keeper of the grail.

The narrative veers between early 1990s London and scenes from the past, between Lucas's quest to discover the truth (is Antoney dead?), and the early Caribbean struggles, the golden years of Midnight Ballet with Antoney's ego trips and his constant fascination with Nijinsky, the great Russian dancer, his potent love affair with Carla and then their break-up, before, without seeming to break the rhythm, suddenly surfacing into the present with Lucas burgling Riley's flat to rummage for clues, the story on tenterhooks once more.

The effect is of movement, of constant switches of pace and direction, which, as they elongate through the tale form a clever arc, a rise and fall, like the leap of a dancer never quite landing, so that the story does not conclude so much as continue into a weightless dreamlike fulfilment, a passing on, and Lucas learns not least that the road he must pursue is not that of his father, but his own.

The story is complex, clever, seamlessly achieved, its many currents blending in harmony, sometimes in conflict, to recreate that sense of randomness and accident that resemble the truth of life in the chancy present. The human heart is at the heart of it, aptly so, and the writer's rhythm becomes the beat of the story's dance.

Diana Evans knows her characters comprehensively. To love them in the process of fully creating them is, one senses, a pre-condition for their existence. Were Evans to relish them any the less, despite their foibles, their flaws, their vagaries, then the glow, the burn, the pain of their existences would utterly fail to materialise as it does. The author's passion burns on the page, along with an almost tactile relish of the act of writing itself.

&#149 Diana Evans is at the Edinburgh book festival on 31 August