Customer Reviews

Different Women Dancing (Windsor Selections S)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is one of my favorite novels. It's not easy, no, but it's damn near brilliant--so much so that I'm at a loss to describe its qualities. If you're looking for an amusing, run-of-the-mill mystery, give this a miss. If you're looking for a series just like Lovejoy, only different, this is not that. But if you're looking for an excellent writer at the top of his game, writing about a world that is dense, skewed, and fascinating--with characters who don't fit any neat little boxes--and are willing to pay attention, you will be more than amply rewarded. Maybe this isn't a 'genre' book. I suspect that, somewhere down the line, it was not marketed properly--perhaps it couldn't have been. But--at least to this reader--it's a work of staggering art and imagination.

Fans of Jonathan Gash, author of the acclaimed Lovejoy series, will be intrigued by the new setting and characters in this book. Clare Burtonall is a doctor; Bonn an enigmatic and skilfull "goer", a paid escort deeply involved in the underworld of the gritty urban scene they both inhabit. Murder draws them ever closer in a heady atmosphere involving real estate development, medicine, sex-for-hire, and fast-moving violence. Gash is a master of language. He rushes his story at you with a new vocabulary, leaving you gasping and struggling to comprehend, but slipping in enough flashes of clarity to keep you understanding events as they rush by. Female readers may agree that he has come close to answering Freud's famous question. What women want may just be someone like Bonn.

I didn't expect a "Lovejoy" type of new series from Gash; maybe something very different. But this book is a true oddity. It begins slow, becomes more interesting in the second half and then peters out; the momentum doesn't carry through. The dialogue is close to indecipherable and makes for very slow going. The concept of the relationship between the two major characters is interesting, which is why I gave it 3 and not 2 stars.

A squalid little book featuring characters almost entirely devoid of redeeming qualities; even the "heroine" is barely admirable. The story's other principal is a male prostitute and erstwhile trainee priest, though how the transformation in lifestyles is achieved is feebly (and implausibly) handled. Although a police officer at one point claims not to believe in coincidences, the plot hinges around several outrageous ones, for instance a shadowy European underworld "financier" just happens to be the cousin of the prostitute's minder. The alleged street language of northwest England is incomprehensible, and the inane device of starting each chapter with a definition of one of these terms - most of which have left the reader befuddled pages earlier - beggars belief. The tale peters out unsatisfactorily at the end, revealing an author who has run out of ideas

Different Women Dancing is certainly no Lovejoy novel. Lovejoy frequently finds himself involved in dark doings and the underside of life, but his attitude towards these things pulls them out of the realm of Dostoevsky. The character of Bonn and that of Dr. Burtonall are not only dark, but depressing. She's a professional woman with no will of her own and an unbelieveable sexual inexperience for a nineties professional woman. Bonn is too ascetic and murky for me to like him much as a human being. But, there is the intriuging part. As a reader one is drawn into this emotionally polluted environment by the writing. I agree with previous reviewers that the language was nearly unintelligible at times, and not because it was English slang; I believe most of it was made up slang. Now, Anthony Burgess created a more complicated language in A Clockwork Orange, but he was kind enough to include a glossary at the back of the book. I was tempted not to complete the novel, but I feel that that's cheating, so I read on to the end. In future, I will stick by Lovejoy and avoid Bonn and the good doctor.