Colum McCann’s Dancer has the most bleak and horrific opening chapter of any book I’ve read. It paints the Russian World War II winter landscape in a way that unquestionably evokes the haunting G-minor Eleventh Symphony of Dimitri Shostakovich. This backdrop provides the means by which a confident young boy, dancing for soldiers recovering in makeshift hospitals, could soak up their admiration and know that this was the course his life was going to take.
The boy is Rudolph Nureyev (Rudi), one of the best ballet dancers to hail from Russia. Although this is a biography of a real person, it is also a piece of fiction. McCann begins with what is factually known of Rudi and imposes his own vision for the types of personalities that one might reasonably expect to have found in Rudi’s inner circle. That any given character is real or unreal is not nearly as important as the connection to, influence over, or feeling for him.
This is amplified by giving each of the swirling cast its own voice (and use of punctuation, oddly). The shifts in speakers occur without regularity and at odd intervals, which make reading the book a frustrating guessing game of Name That Speaker. I am not against this technique, having found it quite effective last month in The Coming Storm, but there it was used beautifully. Here, it gives the story a ramshackle look and feel. The timeline here is much longer too, spanning 5 decades, which means many more speakers. I didn’t count.
Rudi is portrayed as abrasive, focused, adoring of those who impress him and unforgiving of the rest. This did not make him a candidate for a Nice Person award, but it did appear to be the only feasible recipe for his success. I wondered if his personality, like that of other rags-to-riches artists, was more fact and less fiction. I have always held that one can admire art while simultaneously condemning the artist for the sins of his life. Thus, I can respect that his art is legendary and his fame, deserved, while at the same time regretting that his life could not be told in a way that made you sympathetic, like Billy Elliot.
McCann’s focus on the environmental forces as an influence on Rudi feels very real. Where the book works best for me is in the way that it carries on with the mission of the opening scene, portraying the painstakingly slow thaw of Communism, and the way lifestyles within the thinning iron curtain changed over time. I enjoyed the care given to each of the Russian-bound voices on the way Rudi’s defection from Russia affected them, even though we never hear from Rudi himself on why he chose to do this.
Some of the later voices are compelling: Tom the shoemaker, Odile the servant, and Victor the we-never-had-sex-best-friend. It is curious, in the end, how well we know the speakers and the joys and the pitfalls of their relationships and lives, yet how little we know of Rudi and Eric, or Rudi and Margot. Then again, Rudi was not really a “voice” in this book. He comes to us as notes, newsreel footage, and diary-like entries, which has a remarkable, intentional detachment to it.
A warning, gentle reader. Victor’s entrance as a speaker is 30 pages plucked from Dancer from the Dance. Victor is the narrator and Rudi is Malone. Paragraphs begin and end mid-sentence and extend for pages. There is almost no dialog. The setting is 1970’s New York, and there’s all of the obligatory drugs, sex, and the smell of piss that you could ever want. In a way, though, I likened this as a parallel to the opening Russian bleakness. It serves as a backdrop to Odile’s observation of Rudi and Victor as Victor succumbs to the ravages of AIDS, and Rudi, too, eventually. Overall, I’m not compelled to read Dancer again, but you might like it.