The Dancers Dancing
A powerful coming-of-age novel
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
‘Four girls sit on rocks in the middle of the stream: a dark plump girl; a girl whose hair burgeons from her head in a mane of light; another with long white legs and short black shorts, clipped jet hair; a willowy branch of a girl, blonde. The sun shines though green leaves, glancing off chestnut water and all the hair…’
It is 1972: a group of teenagers, some from Dublin, some from Derry, spend a month in the Donegal Gaeltacht, learning Irish language and culture from their teachers and the local people they are boarding with. Liberated for the first time from the restricting reins of parental control, they respond to the untamed landscape of river, hill and sea, finding in it unnerving echoes of their own submerged – and now emerging – wildnesses.
Hailed as ‘one of the most compelling exercises in the female Bildungsroman’ and shortlisted for the Orange Prize for fiction, The Dancers Dancing is an acknowledged classic by one of our most important Irish writers.
If you enjoyed The Dancers Dancing, you might also enjoy Eílís Ní Dhuibhne’s novel Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow and her short story collection The Shelter of Neighbours.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Irish writer Dhuibhne (The Inland Ice; Blood and Water) offers an unruffled, pedestrian view of the lives of pubescent Irish girls in 1972, as a group of teenyboppers embark on their first long trip away from their Dublin and Derry homes. The girls take a bus to Donegal, to attend the summer session at an Irish language and culture school called a Gaeltacht. Two of them, fat misfit Orla and effortlessly perfect Aisling, assume center stage in the mild drama, although Dhuibhne sketches a large cast of supporting characters, including other students and the families the girls board with in Donegal. The story unfolds through quietly revealing dialogue rather than any clear direction in the plot. The young people attend classes and dances, acclimate themselves to their new surroundings, scuffle with familial and social loyalties and endure each other's minor betrayals and teen epiphanies. Orla actively avoids visiting an elderly aunt until the very end of her stay, but when she finally meets her relative, her predictable surprise at the old woman's warmth and endearing eccentricity is tepidly rendered, dissipating the energy for what could have been a poignant, illuminating scene. The girls take every opportunity to swim in a local river, and tragedy is foreshadowed, but when it comes it involves people outside the Gaeltacht, has no impact on the main characters and is dismissed in a page. The pace is sluggish, and the characters, introduced in initially engaging portraits, develop no further as the book progresses. Such obstructions to narrative flow and realized characters blunt the power of Dhuibhne's occasionally lovely prose.
