Swing Time

The director asked his interviewer to roll a clip from the movie Swing Time, a film I know very well, I watched it over and over as a child. I sat up tall in my seat. On the huge screen before me Fred Astaire danced with three silhouetted figures. They can't keep up with him, they begin to lose their rhythm. Finally they throw in the towel, making that very American 'oh phooey' gesture with their three left hands, and walking off stage. Astaire danced on alone. I understood that all three of the shadows were also Fred Astaire. Had I known that, as a child? No one else paws the air like that, no other dancer bends his knees in quite that way. Meanwhile the director spoke of a theory of his, about 'pure cinema', which he began to define as the 'interplay of light and dark, expressed as a kind of rhythm, over time', but I found this line of thought boring and hard to follow.

This idea of “an interplay of light and dark, expressed as a kind of rhythm, over time” from its Prologue just might be the entire point of Swing Time: from the spotlights and the footlights and those who remain in the shadows, to all the lovely tones that human skin comes in, author Zadie Smith repeatedly writes of shades and silhouettes and light, and throughout, people are telling their stories through the rhythm of their feet; white people appropriating black dance moves, which only serves as a continuation of the first dance steps attempted by the original African dancer. This book is about belonging and tribalism on a big scale, but also about family and friendship on the personal; all set to the soundtrack of the Golden Age of the Hollywood Musical. While the rest of the above quote warns that this might be “boring and hard to follow”, Smith is such a precise and entertaining writer that I loved the whole thing. (Note: I read an Advanced Reading Copy and any quotes might not be in their final forms.)

Swing Time is told from the point-of-view of an unnamed London-born narrator who, at seven-years-old, meets at a dance class her life-long friend and foil; another little girl with the same light brown skin tone and clusters of freckles (but while our narrator has a white Dad and a Caribbean-born black Mom – an intact family with a devoted and present father and a hard-studying, self-improving, activist mother – the girl she meets, Tracey, has a white Mom and an absentee Caribbean-born black Dad [and I never did learn what Tracey meant when she said, “You know what they say when your parents are the other way round like yours are”; it had never occurred to me that it would make a difference which parent came from where in a mixed race couple]). It soon becomes clear that while Tracey is a natural and graceful dancer, the narrator has little talent and flat feet, but a real love for watching old musicals. The storyline follows the narrator into her thirties, and over the years, she and Tracey are sometimes friends and sometimes strangers to one another, but whenever they cross paths, they have that instant connection unique to childhood best friends. 

Her life was perfect as far as I was concerned, and this is one side-effect of envy, maybe, this failure of imagination. In my mind, her struggles were over. She was a dancer: she'd found her tribe. I, meanwhile, was caught completely unawares by adolescence, still humming Gershwin songs at the back of the classroom as the friendship rings began to form and harden around me, defined by colour, class, money, postcode, nation, music, drugs, politics, sports, aspirations, languages, sexualities...In that huge game of musical chairs I turned around one day and found I had nowhere to sit.

As an adult, while Tracey is taking a shot at dancing in London's West End productions, the narrator becomes the personal assistant to a Madonna-type pop star; eventually helping her boss to build a girls' school in West Africa (which provides a lot of opportunity to examine celebrity culture and philanthropic adventurism). Technically, the narrator half belongs to the tribe of the white pop star and half belongs to the tribe of the Africans, but in effect, she finds she truly belongs to neither. There's so much built up around how success is tied to a child's homelife – Aimee, the pop star, is super competitive because she grew up poor in small town Australia after losing her Dad as a child; Tracey's fat and lazy mother pushed her to chase her dreams; the narrator's childhood was so supportive [and her mother so fiercely ambitious due to her own impoverished childhood] that she never felt hungry for success herself – and it would seem that Smith is saying that an individual's personality is a bigger contributor to escaping poverty than opportunity. 

I saw all my years at once, but they were not piled up on each other, experience after experience, building into something of substance – the opposite. A truth was being revealed to me: that I had always tried to attach myself to the light of other people, that I had never had any light of my own. I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.

It was also interesting how Smith tied in all the old musicals, and especially how she focused on white stars and their appropriation of black dance moves – Eddie Cantor blackening his face with some burnt charcoal in Ali Baba Goes to Town, Judy Garland dancing as a Zulu in Meet Me in St Louis, Fred Astaire in black face in Swing Time (Astaire apparently also went straight to Michael Jackson's place, begging him to teach him to moonwalk after Motown 25), even Aimee got the villagers to teach her the local dances – and while on the one hand this doesn't sound too politically correct, Smith in several places makes the point that this is the nature of art and the natural way of the world; it's all about belonging and finding your tribe. (In the extreme of tribalism, there are characters throughout time and space in this book who believe in the Illuminati and Lizard People; as though the people you least identify with must not actually be human.)

I'd imagine I've made it clear that there's much going on in Swing Time, and it's all seamless and well put together. Often thoughtful and often funny, I thoroughly enjoyed this read.

The Man Booker 2017 Longlist: 

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster 
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry 
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund 
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid 
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack 
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor 
Elmet by Fiona Mozley 
The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy 
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders 
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie 
Autumn by Ali Smith 
Swing Time by Zadie Smith 
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 

Eventually won by Lincoln in the Bardo, I would have given the Booker this year to Days Without End. My ranking, based solely on my own reading enjoyment, of the shortlist is:

Autumn

Exit West

Lincoln in the Bardo

Elmet

4321

History of Wolves