Customer Reviews

The Dancers Dancing

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When I bought this book in Ireland last year, it was on the bestseller shelves in the bookstores, so Eilis seems popular in her home country. I wanted vacation reading that was literary and reflected the culture of the people in whose country I was a visitor. The book is pretty short, but I feel that is appropriate for the subject matter; it is essentially a string of childhood reminisces loosely gathered into a simple plot, which centers on a group of young pre-teen and teenage Irish and Northern Irish schoolgirls who leave their cities to attend a Gaelic-language school/camp in County Donegal (northwest, Irish-speaking, traditional region).

The short, sweet, lyrical tale is light without being fluffy, and touches on issues of sexual discovery, class and political stratification, and parent-child relationships.

The author beautifully evokes traditional rural Ireland in the 1960's as it is seen through the eyes of saucy urban schoolgirls on the brink of self-discovery.

For all of Ni Dhuibhne's ambition here, the tale she tells drags on. This novel's considered her best by Irish critics, but I believe some of the plaudits it's earned this may be due to the critics' shared memories of studying Irish at summer colleges, rather than the intrinsic merits of the book itself. She varies narrative styles, and at the end her central character comes into the book as a first-person voice which has been for the previous chapters conveyed through the third person, although rarely does the storyline diverge from the perspective of this girl, Orla. Trouble is, sluggish and rather dour, she's not that fascinating a figure to devote so much energy to. Yes, class and political and cultural differences all emerge but these seem by repetition beaten into dullness. The book does not pick up after the girls settle in their summer digs, and the action's told languidly.

One chapter I liked presented the transition into the Irish-language college for the girls; the sentences upended themselves into what the Irish language would be literally translated as, and this does imitate the shift of mentality and comprehension that these city girls would experience when, in various states of readiness or not, they face immersion into their learned language. Less than I expected happens in the classes. Most of the book centers around the home they stay in, the conversations they have, and the scenery they explore. It's all respectably presented, but never really leaps off the page to fire your imagination.

A rare exception: I wish more of the book kept the style of the fine opening section, which takes the bird's eye view and then comes slowly down to earth. But, overall, the novel went on at twice the length it needed to conjure up the feel of adolescence, laziness, and anxiety.

The pace is sluggish. Perhaps this mimics the rhythms of a summer month spent in Donegal, as the book explicitly considers the parallel. But, why take so long to get this across to the patient reader? There's not much of a pay-off at the anticlimactic end, as Orla finally gets the courage to see her Auntie Annie. This, admittedly, is handled subtly and reflects the view of the teenager's mingled awe and resentment and hesitation at meeting her addled elderly relative. But, as the culmination of the work, it's not much return on the reader's investment. The afterword, too, is more matter-of-fact then it could have been, and the angst and longing that Orla apparently reveals in the last few pages seems more of an afterthought than a fully integrated continuation of all that she's before pondered. While Ni Dhuibhne does offer a novel full of rather mundane occurences, as if to emphasize the few moments when life detours from the quotidian, the result when stretched thin over more than 200 pages remains too flat and plain.