"Ballerina", Edward Stewart
16 June 2024 06:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeThis book is basically "The Red Shoes" meets "A Chorus Line" or the love-child of Jackie Collins and Harold Robbins, a behind-the-scenes expose of ballet life: ambition, manipulation, back-stabbing, love affairs and friendships gone sour ... and it's really good. I was astonished to realise on reading the back cover that it was actually written by a man, and a man who was apparently not involved himself in the ballet world; most of the story is told from the view of two young ballerinas training and eventually aspiring to their first big roles, and the viewpoint is completely convincing. (And no, it is NOT a 'young adult' novel and very definitely not aimed at teenagers, any more than Lorna Doone was - not every coming-of-age story is written for a juvenile readership!)
It doesn't really pander to the readers at all so far as ballet terminology goes; you're expected to know what all the technical terminology means, just as the protagonists do. The book isn't there to teach young readers about the wonderful world of ballet or to impress with the author's level of research but to tell a human story, and it does that with successfully compelling force. I think where it really scores, at least for me, is the three-dimensional even-handedness with which it handles the characters - the novel opens in Steph's point of view and she is probably the nearest thing we have to a main protagonist, but we get a moment of revelation where pretty much everyone is concerned in which we see the world through their eyes and understand that they are doing what seems to them the right thing where their own values are concerned.
For the older generation, there are still memories of the Nazis and the Second World War - for the very oldest, the Russian Revolution still echoes, and the lost age of Imperial ballet. Marius Volmar is a 'sacred monster' along the lines of Boris Lermontov (and very probably based on the same real-life model) who deliberately manipulates both Steph and Chris for his own ends, but he does it not because he is a sadist but in a quest to restore a long-lost Tchaikovsky ballet scene which for him is the Holy Grail, a device that in fact forms the framing structure for the entire plot. Anna is the classic stage mother against whom Steph rebels, but she too has her tragic backstory and her vulnerabilities (which lead her to get sexually involved with Volmar, whom she knew as a young dancer -- a development that rings psychologically true, and which carries a typically painful charge when we see it through Volmar's eyes and realise that for him it's just a conscious seduction of the middle-aged woman to remove her influence over Steph). We are repeatedly wrong-footed over our assumptions about characters through the authorial device of presenting them first through the lens of one protagonist's assumptions and then developing them.
A classic case is that of the Russian dancer Sasha Bunin, who we meet first through the resentful eyes of Volmar, who has been blackmailed into taking him on and regards him as an ambitious mediocrity who is defecting to the West because he isn't good enough to make it as a principal lead against the competition at the Kirov Ballet, and then see through the eyes of his fellow dancers alternately as a little-boy-lost, a 'bad boy' cutting a sexual swathe through Manhattan society, a serial seducer telling the same sob story (which may yet still be true?) to all the girls in the company, and a lonely expatriate who needs a friend. He is selfish and immature, but he *is* vulnerable (the scene where Steph catches him weeping in the wings isn't staged, because he never even knows she saw him), and Volmar, on whose professional judgement we subconsciously rate Sasha's ability on stage, is ultimately forced to admit to himself that he has been influenced by his own initial bias. The boy isn't just a media sensation or a flashy lead: he *is* talented, he is a good partner for his female co-stars, and he truly cares about ballet. Conceited little bastard, Volmar thought. Conceited and reliable. Like me. And when I am gone, which may be in a day or a month or a year, he will inherit the company. And he will run it well.
Sasha is not the villain, and neither is Volmar. No one is the villain here, not even tiny bit-part characters like Chris's parents who don't want her to dance, or the bitchy chorus boy Ellis (both of whom we perceive in a new light with an unexpected twist of pity at the end). That's one of the things I like a lot about this book. It has no pretensions to high art, but it's written with talent and sympathy for its characters and its subject, and it's a vivid evocation of its setting. Despite its length, it's a compelling read. And it carries genuine emotional weight on a level beyond the simplistic.
It's a 1970s blockbuster doorstep of a novel, but it's a quite unexpectedly good one.
Appears to be available online for free via BookFrom.net: https://www.bookfrom.net/edward-stewart/page,1,189214-ballerina.html
It doesn't really pander to the readers at all so far as ballet terminology goes; you're expected to know what all the technical terminology means, just as the protagonists do. The book isn't there to teach young readers about the wonderful world of ballet or to impress with the author's level of research but to tell a human story, and it does that with successfully compelling force. I think where it really scores, at least for me, is the three-dimensional even-handedness with which it handles the characters - the novel opens in Steph's point of view and she is probably the nearest thing we have to a main protagonist, but we get a moment of revelation where pretty much everyone is concerned in which we see the world through their eyes and understand that they are doing what seems to them the right thing where their own values are concerned.
For the older generation, there are still memories of the Nazis and the Second World War - for the very oldest, the Russian Revolution still echoes, and the lost age of Imperial ballet. Marius Volmar is a 'sacred monster' along the lines of Boris Lermontov (and very probably based on the same real-life model) who deliberately manipulates both Steph and Chris for his own ends, but he does it not because he is a sadist but in a quest to restore a long-lost Tchaikovsky ballet scene which for him is the Holy Grail, a device that in fact forms the framing structure for the entire plot. Anna is the classic stage mother against whom Steph rebels, but she too has her tragic backstory and her vulnerabilities (which lead her to get sexually involved with Volmar, whom she knew as a young dancer -- a development that rings psychologically true, and which carries a typically painful charge when we see it through Volmar's eyes and realise that for him it's just a conscious seduction of the middle-aged woman to remove her influence over Steph). We are repeatedly wrong-footed over our assumptions about characters through the authorial device of presenting them first through the lens of one protagonist's assumptions and then developing them.
A classic case is that of the Russian dancer Sasha Bunin, who we meet first through the resentful eyes of Volmar, who has been blackmailed into taking him on and regards him as an ambitious mediocrity who is defecting to the West because he isn't good enough to make it as a principal lead against the competition at the Kirov Ballet, and then see through the eyes of his fellow dancers alternately as a little-boy-lost, a 'bad boy' cutting a sexual swathe through Manhattan society, a serial seducer telling the same sob story (which may yet still be true?) to all the girls in the company, and a lonely expatriate who needs a friend. He is selfish and immature, but he *is* vulnerable (the scene where Steph catches him weeping in the wings isn't staged, because he never even knows she saw him), and Volmar, on whose professional judgement we subconsciously rate Sasha's ability on stage, is ultimately forced to admit to himself that he has been influenced by his own initial bias. The boy isn't just a media sensation or a flashy lead: he *is* talented, he is a good partner for his female co-stars, and he truly cares about ballet. Conceited little bastard, Volmar thought. Conceited and reliable. Like me. And when I am gone, which may be in a day or a month or a year, he will inherit the company. And he will run it well.
Sasha is not the villain, and neither is Volmar. No one is the villain here, not even tiny bit-part characters like Chris's parents who don't want her to dance, or the bitchy chorus boy Ellis (both of whom we perceive in a new light with an unexpected twist of pity at the end). That's one of the things I like a lot about this book. It has no pretensions to high art, but it's written with talent and sympathy for its characters and its subject, and it's a vivid evocation of its setting. Despite its length, it's a compelling read. And it carries genuine emotional weight on a level beyond the simplistic.
It's a 1970s blockbuster doorstep of a novel, but it's a quite unexpectedly good one.
'Dorcas, you are a mediocrity. '
'If that's meant as an insult, try again.'
'You are a pretentious, self-serving, self-deceiving second-rater.'
She leaned over the desk, teeth bared. 'Wrong, wrong, wrong, right. I have no pretensions when it comes to dance. I am serving this company, not my ego. I do not fool myself. I know I'm a second-rater, the same as half the people in this world, which is why I'm able to speak their language.'
Appears to be available online for free via BookFrom.net: https://www.bookfrom.net/edward-stewart/page,1,189214-ballerina.html