t is the wheel of fire as before, though the spokes have turned, and we are able to catch sight of some new faces in the thrall of the unending story. As before in the novels of Russell Hoban's old age, we meet a man and a woman past their youth, who encounter one another for the first time maybe and unpack the archaeologies of their presentations of self and (maybe, maybe not) mate at the end of things. We are in the presence of music as before, too, in this case a clutch of songs from a punk rock band—past its sell-by but fighting back—called Mobile Mortuary, and "Herr Oluf," an irresistable ballad from 1821 by Carl Loewe. We are also surrounded by visual analogues of the story being unfolded, in this case The Cyclops by Odilon Redon, whose gaze rhymes deadly with the protagonists' sense that they are bound to a tale they cannot escape, cannot close the eyes of.
And, as before, we see that we are in the great omphalos of London itself—the gong-tormented streets, the eating-places high and low, the golden Thames still dying, the Avernus of the Underground—the kaleidoscope Ronde of the vast inner city throwing up matches and mismatches, coincidences god-ordained or random, assonances of the Twice-Told that stir and coil into runes the ashen erasures of human aging, mortals not being very good at repeating the stories that tell them, for we forget our lines, we die too soon to tell all. Everything turns like some Meissen clockwork till it drops, or until it's dropped, maybe by the god. It is all something of a merry-go-round, and it's not entirely easy to know where to hop on; maybe the title will do.
Come Dance With Me is Russell Hoban's sixth novel in as many years, each of them set in the echolalia of London. The words of the title are a direct translation of "Komm tanze mit mir!" In Johann Gottfried Herder's 1779 poem "Erlkonigs Tochter," which he took from a folk tale, and which Goethe rewrote in 1782, the erl-king's daughter repeatedly invites Herr Oluf to come dance with her; he refuses, as he is to be wed the next day; in reprisal, she kills him with a touch. Goethe's surreal version of the tale (with an inserted father) was set by Franz Schubert in 1815; Herder's rougher version, set by Loewe in a musicial idiom less daring than Schubert's but perhaps more hauntingly balladic, provides the unequivocal premise for Hoban's own tale, which he tells in a voice that seems quiet only until you listen hard—like the voice of Luis Bunuel in a film like The Phantom of Liberty (1976). When you listen hard to Hoban, or watch Bunuel hard, it seems silent only for a little while, until your senses clear, and meaning washes you in its roar.
Dancing with themselves
The novel, which takes place over the course of a week in January 2003, is told as a sequence of 38 precisely dated first-person monologues. The first of them gives us Christabel Alderton, 54-year-old singer-songwriter for Mobile Mortuary, who is remembering when she was 13 and for an instant the visible world froze into something like a photograph of itself, and she knew that someone (it would turn out always to be a man) was about to die. The language in which she recounts this memory is utterly clear; no metaphors fog the plate. It is a clarity common to great stories of the fantastic, where what is said is what is meant; and it is absolutely central to any understanding of Come Dance With Me, which is mainly about its protagonists' attempts to dislodge themselves from the thrall of pre-ordination. Without understanding that the deadpan steady-camera literalness of telling of Come Dance With Me does mean exactly what it says, traditional critics will almost certainly miss the point, and will treat Christabel's lockstep with doom as a psychological problem she needs to be cured of (by mid-February, Peter Parker in the London Sunday Times had already described the nail-biting conclusion to the novel as "whimsical").
She then attends an exhibition, where she sees Redon's hypnotizing story-eye of a painting, and she faints. On recovering, she sees a man who is watching her. She says to him, without reflection, "Komm tanze mit mir!" He escorts her home, and leaves her; she looks back, and for an instant the world turns into a photograph, freezing into one image the passing scene and the fixative gaze of some god of story (it may be). We pass on to the voice of the man she has met and (it may be) cursed, Elias Newman, 62-year-old diabetologist, who remembers his childhood in Germany, when his mother would sing the Loewe song to him. Something is Twice-Told here; something is closing its jaws.
The tale continues. They meet again, they spend a night together. Other voices enter—Elias' ancient mother, Jimmy Wicks, the guitarist with Mobile Mortuary secretly in love with Christabel. We learn of other men who have died after Christabel has seen them in stop-action. The days and hours pass in march-step. We become very apprehensive that Elias, whom Hoban depicts as a good competent wise man and something of a survivor, may not in fact survive his proximity to Christabel. But something begins to happen. On 25 January, Christabel travels to Hawaii to mark the anniversary of the death of her 4-year-old son; her trip is like a funeral march; we are sure she is close to suicide herself—partly (it may be) to keep Elias from the rhyme of death; partly (this is certain) because she finds her son's death (he fell off the cliff she is almost certainly going to jump off herself) intolerable to contemplate.
Stop—and start—making sense
At this point—without any fuss from Hoban, almost it might seem offhandedly—the narrative of the world splits in two. Elias speaks to a patient he visits regularly on his hospital rounds. The patient tells him that the Heinz company has suddenly decided that if you flip its ketchup bottle upside down, the ketchup can flow. "Things go on the same year after year," his patient tells Elias. "Then all at once they get turned around. Pay attention. ... Think about it." Elias does. He follows Christabel to Hawaii the following day. He follows Christabel to Hawaii several days later. He finds Christabel just in time to save her life. He is still in the plane, miles and a world short of the saving moment. The song has lifted. The song is sung. We are free. We are dead.
The choice lies on the page like a prayer.
None of this makes the slightest sense unless the whole novel makes sense. Every word must be taken to mean what it says, or we are in that state of whimsy inhabited by the unfortunate Peter Parker. In fact, if Come Dance With Me is not a novel of the fantastic—if it does not mean exactly what it says about the doom of story its protagonists challenge—then it is nothing but gossip, and the ending of the thing is a shambles, dead silent except for noise. But of course Come Dance With Me is not a tale of deadly whimsy. It is a novel of the fantastic, and maybe a great one. It only seems offhand; it only seem quiet. It is a tale told by an old man with perfect pitch for the roar of meaning.
