Book reviews: Swing Time | Cove

Zadie Smith, apparently, reviewed her debut novel anonymously saying that 'this kind of precocity in so young a writer has one half of the audience standing to applaud and the other half wishing, as with child performers of the past (Shirley Temple, Bonnie Langford et al), she would just stay still and shut up. White Teeth is the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired tap-dancing 10-year-old.'

Smith poses serious questions and offers no pat answers. Photograph: Bryan Bedder/Getty

It seems therefore fitting that the epigraph to Swing Time is a Hausa proverb, “when the music changes, so does the dance”, and that its two central characters first meet as children en route to their dance class. One will fail and one will succeed; or rather both will do both, twice, but not in the ways they hoped. It is a novel full of dancing – not just the ballet, tap and modern in Miss Isabel’s class, but moonwalking, pogoing up and down in Camden goth clubs, MTV proto-twerking, Fred Astaire, a West African kankurang and more. But the music has definitively changed. Swing Time bears the same relationship to White Teeth as Jonathan Safran Foer’s bittersweet recent work, Here I Am, bears to his debut: what it might lose in exuberance, it gains in political sophistication and emotional maturity.

With some justice, White Teeth was described as “Dickensian”; and it is hard to disagree given the novel’s effervescent comedy (transgenic mice, an Islamist group so incompetent they don’t realise an acronym of their organisation is KEVIN). Moreover, even when the characters were flawed, they had saving graces. By contrast, Swing Time is more like the work of George Eliot. Good intentions often mask solipsistic ambitions; selfish aims can be honourable aspirations. The best can be thoughtless to the point of narcissism, and the least likeable can be seen to have valid reasons for their hard-heartedness or blinkered opinions. It is a true, and beautifully executed tragicomedy.

The narrator’s life intersects primarily with three women. There is her mother, whose political consciousness is also a kind of social climbing; her friend Tracey, born on the dodgier part of the estate and looking to celebrity as a means of escape; and later on, her employer, Aimee, a kind of allusive amalgamation of Madonna, Kylie Minogue and Angelina Jolie. The nuances of class distinction are explored with even more subtlety than they were in NW. Aimee has decided that she wants to open a school in West Africa. Her logic is explained with understated surrealism: from “we have to be the change we want to see”, she and her peers “feel an obligation to do something good with their own good fortune”. “If you followed the logic all the way to the end of the revolving belt,” the narrator muses, “then after a few miles you arrived at a new idea, that wealth and morality are in essence the same thing, for the more money a person had, then the more goodness – or potential for goodness – a person possessed.” Her mother, turning her zeal into a career, finds this naïve, and there is much in the narrative where innocent idealism and difficult pragmatic decisions crunch like an arthritic joint. Tracey acts as a dark mirror for these ideas; and it would give away too much of the very elegant plotting to elaborate. The novel places certain words and images with immense precision; so a childhood story about the Sankofa bird is reiterated towards the end in the name of a new character; certain musicals loop through the narrative at key moments.

Class, race, ideas of Africa as despotic playground and origin of humanity, how popular culture moulds and distorts us, protest versus government, intervention versus self-sufficiency, the appeal of radical Islam to an uprooted generation, the existential bankruptcy of the West: Smith tackles all of this, with both boldness, in that they are foregrounded, and bravery, in that she poses serious questions and offers no pat answers. The “issues” never feel programmatic or polemical in the manner which marred Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s otherwise fascinating Americanah. The ideas are choreographed with bravura: if White Teeth was Busby Berkeley, Swing Time is Pina Bausch.

There is a tone of wry ruefulness throughout. On a flight, one of Aimee’s other PRs is reading novels for prospective film projects and pronounces on the literary world thus: “‘Zippy’ – which was good; ‘Important’ – which was very good; ‘Controversial’ – which could be either good or bad, you never knew; or ‘Lidderary’, which was pronounced with a sigh and an eye roll and was very bad.” Although this is smart, it is also true on two levels. It does reflect the banality of some of our criticism, but I doubt any reader would not find Swing Time to be zippy, important, controversial and literary in the more common senses of those words. As well as the shrewd observation and sly satire we expect from Smith, this has profundity and genuine purpose, as well as some of the most heart-stoppingly lyrical writing of her career thus far. At times, the lines from Stevie Smith’s aching poem, The Frog Prince echoed in my head: “Only disenchanted people/Can be heavenly”.

Zadie Smith

Cove by Cynan Jones

Granta, £9.99

Ernest Hemingway has been dead for more than half a century now, but he still casts such a long shadow that if you describe another author’s style as “economical” many readers will automatically assume that you mean it is in some way Hemingway-esque.

Cynan Jones’s writing in Cove is a brilliant study in economy, yet it could hardly be more different from, for example, Hemingway’s writing in The Old Man And The Sea – a book to which, in terms of subject matter at least, is bears a strong resemblance.

Like Santiago, the unnamed hero of Cove finds himself alone at sea in a small boat, locked in an unequal battle with the natural world. Like Santiago, he is a fisherman (although a recreational fisherman in a sea kayak somewhere off the coast of Britain looking to catch a mackerel for his tea, rather than an impoverished professional trying to hook a blue marlin off the coast of Cuba). In both books, much of the action takes place inside the protagonists’ heads, as they try to think their way out of a series of problems while staving off pain, fear and despair.

But whereas Hemingway’s prose in The Old Man And The Sea is so simple and pared-to-the-bone that it feels monumental, Jones’s writing, although also stripped back, is delicate and poetic.

At a key moment in the story, just before Jones’s hero is struck by lightning, “A metallic sheen comes to the water, like cutlery. Like metal much touched. The white clouds glow, a sort of leaden at the edge.” When the kayaker comes to after the strike and tries to piece together what has happened to him, his consciousness is “a snapped cord that his mind is trying to pull back together”. Looking down at his injured left hand, he notes that it is “fractalled with a strange blue pattern, seems tattooed, a pattern the way ice forms on aeroplane glass”.

If Hemingway’s prose resonates with universal truths, Jones’s shimmers with suggestiveness and ambiguity.

It’s not just the language that’s poetic in Cove either – the way Jones breaks up his text into isolated chunks that almost look like stanzas makes it feel like something halfway between a novel and a long-form poem, while at the same time reflecting its protagonist’s disconnected mental state. Like Max Porter’s heartbreaking and uncategorisable Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, published last year, it’s almost as if Jones couldn’t find an existing form that allowed him to write the book he had in his head so he decided to invent one. I look forward to his next experiment.

Roger Cox