Dancing Lessons by Olive Senior
This is a story of the human cost of a feudal slave-owning society to the generations that follow freedom. It takes place in rural Jamaica, a short way out of Kingston, the capital.
G's attraction for the charming and much older Charlie Samphire begins when she sees him waiting beside the road she takes to town on an errand for her strict caretakers, Miss Celia and Aunt Zena. The young girl's conviction that Charlie loves her takes root when he stops to rest his horse beside a stream and feeds her a Bombay mango. Trapped in their illusion of social superiority, Miss Zena and Miss Celia allow their pointless snobbery to cut them off from G. Not that they were very warm to her in the first place.
At sixteen, G marries Charlie and has four children in rapid succession. Her only ally is her mother in law, who teaches her a dizzying array of housekeeping tasks. Working at these, the two women numb themselves against the harsh facts of their lives.
Mrs. D needs a defense against the violence of her family history, which has scarred her, body and mind. Her daughter-in-law needs solace against the fact that once she has burned her bridges, her husband ignores her from the start and chases a long series of other women.
As an old woman tucked away in the comfortable retirement home Ellesmere Lodge, G looks back over her life and intuits how things could have been different. Across an abyss of silence and coldness stands her daughter Celia, the successful child and the only one who has stood by her. G's house was damaged by a hurricane, and her daughter is paying for her stay at the lodge.
At Ellesmere Lodge, oddly enough, G's journey toward redemption begins with a library book, a garden plot, and a fellow lodger called Mr. Bridges.
I decided to read Olive Senior's work when I heard her interviewed on CBC radio last year. It was a good story, but it slowed down in the middle, and I began to skim. Diligent editing, more showing and less telling would have kept my interest from flagging.
I also had some trouble believing in Charlie -- why did he change as he did? It made no sense to me, and I waited for an enlightenment that didn't come.
Olive Senior won the Commonwealth Book Prize in 1987 for her short story collection Summer Lightning. This is her first novel. It was published in 2011 by Cormorant.