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Zadie Smith
Swing Time
Category: Fiction | Published: 2016 | Review Added: 28-08-2024
In 2006 Madonna, that pop superstar with - to put it politely - as much talent for self-publicity as for music, founded a charity to improve the health and education of orphans in Malawi. While visiting the south-east African country, she decided to adopt a male child - and succeeded, despite not meeting the country's legal requirement of a year's prior residency. Media controversy ensued. It was all grist to the mill for Madonna, who had been making a career out of fame in the decade or more since the world had largely lost interest in her songs.
Whether you love her or loathe her, there is only one Madonna, and if an author is going to use her as the basis for a character, there's little point in disguising her beyond the minimum necessary to avoid libel suits. So in this, her fifth novel, Zadie Smith makes her singer Australian and calls her Aimee. Superficially, she's half Kylie Minogue, but she lives in New York and everything that's interesting about her - and everything that's hollow about her, while still being interesting - is Madonna.
Aimee's African project is in an unnamed country on the other side of Africa from Malawi (geography nerds will work out that it's the Gambia). Apart from this difference, Aimee's philanthropic activity mirrors Madonna's in its important aspects. She sets up a school for poor African girls, and its foundation is beleaguered by organisational chaos and corruption. As the novel progresses, Aimee's involvement in the school and the life of its village assumes a capricious and ethically ambivalent character.
Aimee is one is one of three characters around whom the novel is structured. The second is the narrator, a personal assistant to Aimee. We never learn her name, but she was raised on a London council estate as the daughter of a West Indian mother and a white father.
The third character is Tracey, a childhood friend of the narrator who is also mixed-race. Tracey lived on a rougher council estate. Her home life was troubled, and her attitude to the world is hostile. But she had a talent for dancing, which gave her a sense of identity that the narrator envied. The narrator loved to watch and participate in dancing as much as Tracey, but she didn't have the talent. Against this, she did have intelligence, and an instinct for self-preservation that Tracey lacked.
The novel tells two stories: the chronologically longer one covering the narrator's youth and friendship with Tracey, and the shorter one covering her period of employment with Aimee. Smith uses a similar narrative technique to Graham Swift, interweaving the strands chapter by chapter, and letting their connections appear gradually. This is an excellent way of creating suspense, and among the novel's many fine qualities is that it is very gripping. We sense the general direction in which both strands are heading, but we don't know exactly how they will converge.
However, Swing Time is more than just a well-paced modern yarn: more importantly, it is a profound contemplation of identity and character. Tracey has a strong sense of what she wants to be - a professional dancer - but her drive and intensity are inextricable from her emotional instability. The narrator is well-balanced, but arrives at the disquieting acknowledgement of a parasitic streak in herself;
It's no coincidence, then, that she never reveals her name: in her own mind she doesn't have one. The omission of it, even in dialogue, is so subtly managed that it doesn't strike the reader until a fair way into the book. It does not feel artificial: her name must have been spoken, but she was deaf to it.
The roots of the narrator's insecurity lie partly in her feeling of inferiority to her mother, a strong-willed, self-educated immigrant who has risen to a position of political influence. The narrator's drift towards a career in the shallow worlds of the media and showbusiness is partly a reaction to her mother's self-conscious intellectualism. At times, the narrator questions her mother's motives: is she really so passionate about improving the lives of poor people in her community, or is she more concerned about "arriving", about becoming somebody important? Is she much different, at bottom, from Aimee? These questions are never answered unequivocally: Smith's interest is in the ambiguities of human nature, not in didactic conclusions.
Equally significant in the narrator's weak sense of herself is her status as neither black nor white. Perhaps, in producing a child without racial identity, her parents were showing the world that racial identity was unimportant:
Smith's contemplation of racial identity is far-sighted: she sees it as a particular instance of a general human problem. The same is true of racial atrocities. The narrator visits an island off the African coast from which slaves were shipped, but cannot summon up the emotions she expects from herself:
The novel is rich in characterisation. Among Aimee's assistants is Granger, a huge black bodyguard, who despite his intimidating appearance is gentle, thoughtful, fun-loving - and, surprisingly, gay. Working for Aimee's foundation in Africa is Fernando, a serious-minded Brazilian aid worker who is determined to make the scheme work, despite being under no illusions about the flippancy of his employer's ostentatious philanthropy. Two teachers in the new school are also well drawn: Lamin, an inscrutable go-between with one eye on an American visa; and Hawa, a beautiful and joyful young woman whose only worry is that she can't find a husband in a country from which all the capable and desirable men are emigrating.
From its subject matter, one might assume Swing Time to be opportunistically exploiting topical themes of race, celebrity and globalisation. But why should a novel aspiring to contemporary significance avoid these subjects when, after all, they loom so large in the minds of us all, whether we like it or not? Smith deals with them at a profound level; she has the gift of being able to write both analytically and impressionistically, and she can weave ideas into human stories in the same unassuming way as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy.
Do I have any criticisms to make? Well, it's not a cheering read. Most of the characters don't find happiness where they hope to: not even, in the end, the indomitable Aimee. By the time they realise they've chosen the wrong paths, it's too late. Also, there are a few usages that will offend pedants of older generations ("aggravated" meaning "irritated"; "mutual" meaning "common").
I will say in conclusion that, as somebody who doesn't read much contemporary fiction, I was made to reflect by Swing Time that as long as the world keeps changing - for better and worse - there will be good novels to be written about it.