Swing Time
by Zadie Smith
Hamish Hamilton 464pp £18.99
The Week Bookshop £14.99
Zadie Smith’s fifth novel, Swing Time, centres on two childhood friends, both mixed race, who grow up (as Smith herself did) in Willesden, northwest London, in the 1970s and 1980s. They look alike (as if cut from a single “piece of tan material”) and, as girls, both aspire to be dancers. Only one of the pair, Tracey, has real talent – but thanks to a troubled home life and capricious personality, she never makes it. Meanwhile, her friend, the unnamed narrator, abandons dancing and, in her 20s, becomes PA to a globally famous, Madonna-like pop star. “This is the territory of Zadie Smith at her finest,” said Aminatta Forna in The Guardian. Swing Time is an “unflinching portrait of friendship, driven as much by jealousy and competition as by love and loyalty”. With impressive insight, Smith explores the “subtle distinctions of class and race” that not only define her characters’ trajectories but eventually “drive them apart”.
“As a study in rootlessness, Swing Time is often superb,” said Jon Day in the Financial Times. Since moving to New York in the early 2000s, Smith has become increasingly preoccupied with evoking the “fine-grained minutiae” of northwest London. The childhood and adolescent sections “crackle with life”, though the novel “loses its way slightly” when it moves away from Willesden. “I can see why Smith chose the world of celebrity as a dramatic contrast with her narrator’s humble beginnings,” said Sameer Rahim in Prospect. Unfortunately, Aimee, the pop star, is “thinly characterised”, and her desire to build a school in an unnamed African country “leads the novel down a blind alley”. Swing Time’s African section isn’t its only failure, said Houman Barekat in the Literary Review: throughout, this novel is “drearily essayistic”. For the London scenes, “imagine a precis of a decade’s worth of articles from The Guardian’s Comment is Free section, unceremoniously shoehorned into narrative fiction”. Smith’s much-praised prose seldom rises above the level of “anaemically bland journalese”. I disagree, said Taiye Selasi in The Observer: a “best friend Bildungsroman” in the Elena Ferrante mould, this is a novel that not only has “brilliant things to say about race, class and gender” but also tells a “truly marvellous” story. “And the music! If one were to make a playlist of the references, one would have a greatest hits of black music.” For my money, Swing Time is Smith’s “finest” novel yet.
Composer: Jacques Offenbach Director: John Schlesinger Conductor: Evelino Pidò Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020-7304 4000) Until 3 December Running time: 3hrs 45mins (including two intervals)
“The best compliment I can pay this performance is to say that for its enjoyable duration I stopped worrying about Donald Trump ruling the free world,” said Rupert Christiansen in The Daily Telegraph. Such is the “facile charm” of Offenbach’s music, and the “spectacular glamour” of John Schlesinger’s lavish staging, that I “drifted into a world of escapist fantasy – one of art’s most precious gifts to humanity”. The Royal Opera House has announced it will be retiring Schlesinger’s production (originally staged in 1980) after this revival – and admittedly, the staging did look a little “frayed at the edges”. Even so, it will be “greatly missed”. With its gorgeous designs by William Dudley and Maria Björnson, it’s a survivor from “an era when directors knew how to give audiences a good time”.
Over the years, said Richard Fairman in the FT, this production has boasted a succession of memorable tenors in the title role – Plácido Domingo, Alfredo Kraus and Rolando Villazón among them. And in this final incarnation, the singer giving voice to Hoffmann’s “beer-soaked recollections of unfulfilled dreams and loves lost” is Vittorio Grigòlo, a man who “does not know what half-hearted means”. He throws “body and soul” into every aspect of the character, from the eager young suitor to the down-and-out poet mired in his past. “The blazing ardour” of Grigòlo’s singing “reveals the poet Hoffmann as a life force, burning brilliantly till the last drop of energy is spent”.
Thomas Hampson plays the multiple versions of Hoffmann’s demonic nemesis with an unsettling mix of menace and charm, said Tim Ashley in The Guardian. The women are also excellent. Sofia Fomina’s Olympia, with her “steely, clockwork coloratura”, contrasts nicely with Christine Rice’s “truly dangerous” Giulietta. Sonya Yoncheva makes a heartbreaking Antonia, and Kate Lindsey is strong as Nicklausse, the “voice of reason that Hoffmann all too rarely hears”. All told, this is a “beguiling” piece of music theatre: by turns “witty, erotic and macabre”.