The cover of Barbara Trapido’s latest novel, this year’s Sex & Stravinsky, is of a young ballerina with her back to the camera. Poised in a gorgeous white tutu and with hair neatly corn-plaited, she is as elegant and fetching as any Degas figure. Trapido’s writing in this, her seventh novel, is equally graceful and assured. Her ease with words and her ability to suggest disquieting undercurrents ensure that the story unfolds with the natural beauty of an immaculately choreographed and performed version of Swan Lake. So why was I left feeling frustrated by the end?
The story involves several strong characters who Trapido describes with vim. It is Oxford, England, in 1995. Caroline is a multi-talented Australian woman who has, on account of her parasitic and malevolent mother, sacrificed much. She dropped out of a post-graduate course at Oxford University after her mother guilt-tripped her about money shortages. Caroline’s sister Janet is the favoured sibling and lives with their mother in Australia; she is always being held up by their mother as a paragon of virtue and martyred ill health. When circumstances in their home in Melbourne change, their mother descends on Caroline in the bus in which Caroline, her husband and their ballet-mad daughter Zoe live.
Zoe is twelve and has longed to be allowed to take ballet lessons for years, but the financial burden of Caroline’s mother’s arrival puts paid to that dream. Instead, Caroline insists that Zoe look forward to her impending French exchange, something for which Zoe can summon no enthusiasm.
Zoe is close to her father Josh who is married to superwoman Caroline. Josh was bowled over by Caroline’s intelligence and many skills when they first met, but his doubts right at the start are mischievously expressed by Trapido:
‘Caroline is quite simply Wonder Woman, and that’s in itself diverting, even though she herself is not a person with whom one can giggle and conspire. Caroline is not a ‘fun’ person and Josh is almost never really funny with her; not the way he was with Hattie.’
Hattie is Josh’s tiny dance teacher and ex-girlfriend in Durban, South Africa. They had an intense, blissfully happy friendship when Josh lived in Durban during his college years. But when push came to shove, Hattie chose someone who looked better on paper – OK, looked better period: tall, hunky, blond Herman, whose attributes showed up Josh’s lack of height and looks. In fact, Hattie and Caroline have something in common because Hattie too is the least favourite sibling, her spoilt, venal brother James having been the recipient of all their parents’ attention and largesse. Caroline and Hattie also share a difficult relationship with their daughters – both are Daddy’s girls, with Hattie’s daughter Cat being openly hostile to her caring mother. This is one of the many symmetries that continue the allegory of a dance – two neglected daughters, their two cossetted, entitled siblings, two dissatisfied teenage girls, two men (Hattie’s brother James and Jack, the son of the Silvers’ black housemaid) who don’t appreciate the benevolence of their benefactors and are emotionally unreachable. The structure, like the writing, is thus striking and meticulously planned.
Josh was adopted by a liberal couple, the Silvers, in Durban. The Silvers campaigned vociferously for the demise of apartheid. They also sponsored Jack, the son of their single black housemaid Gertrude through school in Swaziland. Trapido is good at casually dropping bombshells and snippets of shocking recent historical detail: we learn that Jack was sent to school in Swaziland because at the time it would have been illegal for him to attend a decent fee-paying school in South Africa, and she refers to the days in which it was illegal for blacks to buy alcohol.
So the stage is set for the dance. The characters mingle and part, skirt the edges of each others’ lives and then plunge in. The chapters are entitled according to which character’s action they follow, and though all are related in the third person, there are deft touches to personalise some of them, for instance, Cat’s chapter is narrated with eye-rolling teenage impatience and the use of ‘like’ as a precursor to many sentences.
The strength of Trapido’s writing lie in the sure way in which she tells her stories. There is often an undercurrent of sardonic humour, and what’s unspoken is abundantly clear. We initially learn how ghastly Caroline’s mother is partly through her terse, cool letters which, beneath their surface, swim with disdain, envy and resentment. Trapido is often very funny in this way – she doesn’t need to spell everything out, the reader uses their own intuition, in my case leading to frequent squirms of horrified delight.
There are some wickedly ascerbic and insightful descriptions. Here is Trapido’s take on one of the most underfunded areas of the NHS in full glory:
‘The neurosurgeon is concerned that (X) is excessively lethargic and arranges for another brain scan. Then, two days later and with no prior warning, Caroline arrives to find that X has been moved out of the gleaming neuroscience ward, with its generous supply of committed and highly skilled nurses. She has gone far down the food chain, into a slovenly and understaffed geriatric ward, where hollow-eyed and hopeless oldies are groaning feebly, calling out in vain for commodes, or shuffling on Zimmer frames in fluffy dressing gowns to a lavatory that’s doing its damndest to scream a warning to all potential users. ‘Attention! Superbug! Please do not enter!’ The whole ward reeks of diarrhoea. Beds are unmade, there are balls of stained cotton wool and discarded adhesive dressings dotted about the cracked linoleum floor and – try indefatigably as Caroline does, day after day, from now on -no senior doctor is ever available to discuss X’s case…The neurosurgeon himself is as if teleported to Planet Zorg.’
This is pure brilliance. With a sharp eye and caustic humour, Trapido dissects one of our most beloved institutions, throws a dart at its vulnerable centre and strikes a bull’s eye.
My main problem with this novel was that the plot didn’t match the glimmering talent of Trapido’s prose because of the mass of unlikely coincidences. Life is rich and coincidences do occur naturally, but it’s not since reading a Kate Atkinson detective mystery years ago (When Will There Be Good News, since you ask) that I’ve actually cringed at the implausibility of so many fortuitous events occuring simultaneously. I know coincidences are a Trapido trademark and that her novels are often appreciated as fairy tales rather than realistic scenarios. But this jarrs with her intelligence and razor-edged ability to capture what’s unspoken in life.
There are just so many coincidences (spoiler alert): Hattie turns out to write the ballet books that Zoe loves. And she teaches ballet, which has been Zoe’s passion for years. Just by chance, Josh travels from England to Durban for a conference and bumps into Hattie. They are – amazingly – booked in to speak at the same conference. And there is instant mutual love. Meanwhile, Jack has been able to forge a new life for himself because a poet who visited his school in Swaziland with his favourite teacher happened to die in a car crash, but not before he’d conveniently left his passport, air tickets and a vast sum of money in Jack’s bathroom. This allowed Jack the opportunity to take up the dead man’s identity and use his air tickets. And when he reached the dead poet’s destination, Jack chanced upon a rich and generous widower, Eduardo, who just happened to be looking for someone to teach his sons English. That’s for the three months of the year Eduardo’s family is away from Milan, that is, because the rest of the year, the boys attend school in Milan. Which gives Jack time to study at Milan university, which will of course be paid for by his new benefactor, who also – bizarrely – offers Jack a permanent home in his own swanky pad. All this with no expectation of anything untoward. And of course the widower has no partner who might be perturbed at finding a new permanent resident at Eduardo’s home. In any case, after some time, Jack decides to travel back to Durban, the city in which he lived with the Silvers, and happens to rent rooms in the same house as the one in which his mother worked before Jack’s birth; the same room, in fact, in which Jack was conceived. And Jack’s unknown father turns out to be the sibling of one of the main characters. And this man happens also – coincidentally – to have been at Josh’s school where he tormented and stole from Josh. Gosh - small world.
Meanwhile Caroline takes a trip with Zoe to South Africa and – wonders will never cease - happens to meet Hattie’s husband Herman in a cafe in Jo’burg – which Herman is visiting. Not only that, but Herman leaps to her rescue in the cafe and there is instant bilateral attraction. Plus they’re booked on the same flight to Durban. Herman, smitten, invites Caroline to his mansion where they fall first in lust and then love. Do men usually invite strange women to their family home when they know their wife and daughter will be in? And make them lunch, drink wine with them, offer them showers and then sleep with them in the marital home?
Meanwhile it’s pure serendipity that just as Hattie has fallen for Josh, Josh’s wife has become besotted with Hattie’s husband. And of course, the two daughters are not unhappy at the impending break-ups of their parents’ marriages because – remember? – neither of them liked their own mother much and they’d far rather have the other girl’s mother.
It is the sort of ridiculous series of improbable events that has one muttering ‘surely Trapido won’t have this happen…’, only to realise, with sinking heart, that she does. And what’s worse is you can see the outcomes coming as clearly as if they’re pasted in flashing neon on the page surrounded by multi-colour exclamation marks. As soon as it was mentioned that Gertrude was pregnant, I knew who the father was; as soon as she was turned out on the street I knew why and how she’d been framed; and as soon as she was homeless I knew who would happen to bump into her and save her by offering her a new home. I don’t like giving up on books so I kept reading to the end, but I was inwardly groaning. Sure, there are a few flies thrown into the ointment in the last few pages but nothing major, so that the whole thing is about as plausible and credible as Cinderella.
The perplexing thing is, why does such a talented writer need to resort to such disappointing and embarrassing coincidences to effect a happy ending? Is a happy ending more important than the integrity of the plot? It’s doubly enervating because in other respects Trapido is worthy of praise. Her characters may be a bit black and white - Caroline’s evil mother has no redeeming features whatsoever while Caroline’s sister is as plain, foul and selfish as one of Cinderella’s ugly sisters. But they are deliciously entertaining characters, brought to life with intelligence and wit. Why ruin them with the story?
It’s a real shame that instead of producing a book that could have gripped the attention and teased the reader’s expectations, Trapido has combined her brilliantly acidic insights on human life with a fluffy fairy-story plot that is predictable and unlikely. One of my closest friends loved the book but for me, as much as I savoured Trapido’s writing, believable characters need to do believable things for me to care.
