The only game in town
John de Falbe
COME DANCE WITH ME by Russell Hoban Bloomsbury, £15.99, pp. 162, ISBN 0747574529 ✆ £13.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Early in Come Dance with Me, 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. Nowhere 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 oddities that are distinctively, strikingly his.
Their charm and force derive 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.
‘You never know when you’re going to be attacked by a metaphor or run over by a paradigm,’ Elias observes. This occurs memorably in this novel with ketchup bottles, whose new upside-down design is drawn to Elias’s attention by Abraham Selby, a diabetic patient with a ‘lachrymose’ leg. Elias agrees that it’s good news. ‘ “Things go on the same year after year,” said Selby, “then all at once they get turned around. Pay attention,” he said to his leg. To me he said, “Think about it.” ’ It also occurs, less fortunately, with Hawaii. Usually, however odd (or ordinary) Hoban’s objects and signs are, they are not grandiose. This novel is otherwise more straightforward than all his others, so what’s the deal with Hawaii? What’s wrong with Fulham and the 14 bus all of a sudden?
It turns out that Hawaii is the embodiment of extreme loss. Not only has Christabel lost her son here, but, as Rudy explains at length, Hawaii has lost its past to American imperialism, which is alive and well in Iraq. It feels as if Hoban feels so passionately about recent global political events that he cannot help writing about them directly — to the detriment of his subtle art. Reality, which in his delicious novel Fremder is said to be ‘for squilches’, has intruded. The narrator of Amaryllis Night and Day remarks, ‘If reality had a stage door I’d hang around there and see what came out after the show.’ In Come Dance with Me, it’s as if Hoban is so appalled by the events on reality’s stage that he has stomped off to his desk in disgust, without the usual loitering at the stage door.
Nevertheless, a grey February day can only be brightened by a new outing in Hobanland. 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. Walkon parts from previous characters, including Peter Diggs and Amaryllis (‘Trust me, I’m a weirdo’), are like great bunches of flowers presented to faithful readers. Those who gather for the three-day ‘Some-Poasyum’ this month to mark Russell Hoban’s 80th birthday and celebrate his work do not need the new novel to be a masterpiece to justify their enthusiasm.
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