re:mote voices

Title: Looking For The Possible Dance
Author: A.L. Kennedy
Publisher: vintage

Looking For The Possible Dance was the first novel by A.L. Kennedy, originally published in 1993. Unfortunately this novel was out of print by the time I discovered Kennedy - with the paperback of Everything You Need, a novel which I still feel is her best work. Fortunately with the publication of her most recent novel - Paradise - Looking For The Possible Dance is available once more, this new edition from her current publisher Vintage.

Last year, when Kennedy was promoting the hardback edition of Paradise, she admitted that she was no longer as keen on Looking For The Possible Dance as she had been when she wrote it. Something you quite often find with authors looking back to their earlier works. Which is ironic given that in terms of tone and style I would perhaps suggest that Looking For The Possible Dance bares the most similarity to Paradise of all her work that followed that first novel. Lacking the kind of quirks that make So I Am Glad, Everything You Need or even the novella Original Bliss stick out the way they do.

The title comes from two events in the life of our narrator Margaret Hamilton. The first dance is one of the happiest memories in her life, one of the rare occasions when she and her father went out together - her father having raised her as a single parent. The second being a major event at the community centre where she works, a job she has just lost at the start of the novel. Having lost her job, Margaret gets on a train from Glasgow to London, and over the course of the journey she recalls her life and in particular the two men in her life. Her daddy who raised her and who was everything to her as a child, and Colin the man she met in college who abandoned her before coming back three years later to start the relationship again.

As usual Kennedy exhibits a peculiar and wry humour throughout. While contrasting that with a distinct melancholy. A growing feeling that something is going to go wrong, a darkness that is common in Kennedy's work to date. To a degree that turn doesn't feel entirely necessary, or suited to the flow of the plot, on the other hand it transforms it somewhat from being one of those literary novels where nothing happens, while introducing drama without necessarily using melodrama. Narratively Looking For The Possible Dance meanders, jumping about in time and plot. Undoubtedly this is not Kennedy's best work, she has certainly improved since, but even so, I enjoyed it for the writing, for the wit, for being A.L. Kennedy.