A Time to Dance

17/01/2023

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Bernard MacLaverty is an Irish writer with a “Belfast accent, which has never left him, despite having lived and worked in Edinburgh, Glasgow and, remarkably, Islay in the Inner Hebrides.” (The Irish Voice) He may have lived for many years in Scotland but much of his work has focused on Ireland or alludes to the country, including his five novels, Cal, Lamb, Grace Notes, The Anatomy School and Midwinter Break. MacLaverty is still very much seen as an Irish writer rather than a Scottish one and yet a story like 'A Time to Dance' manages to capture the city, Edinburgh, in which it is set, while also making clear the main characters are very much from elsewhere.

 ‘A Time to Dance’ is perhaps a perfect short story, a small contained work that manages to evoke Edinburgh while invoking Ireland, to conjure up childhood without ignoring a mother’s concerns, and is yet another Scottish tale about an absent father. (Celia, On the Island, Shuggie Bain). It also reaches into myth with a story of blindness that is likely to bring to mind Oedipus, and concludes with a biblical quotation from Ecclesiastes. It is also sensorially rich and offers too the occasional examples of witty defamiliarisation and restricted, even unreliable narration.

Here young Nelson is in the first year of secondary school - or would be if he turned up. Much of the time he is skiving, a continuation it seems of his primary school avoidance where his mother almost went to court over his absences. The story doesn’t make much of this avoidance, but we can glean from it that Nelson is a solitary child with poor sight, who has to wear a patch to protect his eyes. MacLaverty doesn’t tell us the disease but we can work it for ourselves based on the name of the patches he has to wear: Opticludes which are worn when people have amblyopia, weak vision in one eye, or basically a squint. If Oedipus blinds himself late in life realising that he has slept with his mother and killed his father, Nelson has poor eyesight early in life but, in a way, this is Oedipus Rex retold.

Nelson’s father is absent and his mother desirable: when she sees him wandering along Princes Street avoiding school one day she grabs him off the streets and is compelled to keep him in her company while she briefly goes off to work. She is employed as a stripper in a bar and we discover this fact through Nelson’s senses. His mum insists he hides away in a small room as she gets changed before going into the main area, and throughout she insists he wears two eyepatches so he doesn’t see her getting undressed nor sees her doing so all over again for the punters. But when she performs, he removes the eye patches and sees her clothes in front of him: “he looked up at his mother’s things, hanging on the hook; her tights and drawers were as she wore them, but inside out and hanging knock-kneed on top of everything. In her bag he found her blonde wig and tried it on, smelling the perfume of it as he did so.” Nelson has a glamorous mum, one who can make money taking her clothes off and receives wolf-whistles from the sixth form when she takes him back to school after her performance. “Nelson felt a flush of pride that she was causing a stir. She was dressed in black satiny jeans, very tight, and her pink blouse was knotted, leaving her tanned midriff bare.” 

While the sixth-form boys know exactly what they find appealing, Nelson’s feelings will be more ambivalent. MacLaverty conveys them in a balance between the sensual and the sensuous, between the sexual and the non-sexual. Nelson probably doesn’t desire his mother like the older boys at school but he is fascinated with the senses her presence allows. “At home he liked nosying around his mother’s room, smelling all her bottles of make-up; seeing her spangled things.” When she returns from performing for the men in the bar, he notes “the smoke from the cigarette in her mouth trickled up into her eye and she held it half shut. Nelson could see the bright points of sweat shining through her make-up…she smelt of drink.” She is clearly a sensuous presence in Nelson’s life, but while the sixth-formers probably have a strong sense of her as a desirable object and a bit of a liability as she comes in no doubt still smelling of alcohol, Nelson is probably trying to make sense of what he is supposed to feel. While Oedipus knows that he wants to kill a man and sleep with a woman, the problem rests on not knowing that the man he kills is his father and the woman he sleeps with his mother. He is saved from ambivalence by ignorance, and tragedy ensues. Nelson’s drama is a bit more unassuming than that, but it allows MacLaverty the opportunity to defamiliarise and narratively restrict. 

In the first instance, we have a child’s like view of events, the sort of defamiliarisation Swift and Tolstoy often practise and that can seem close to unreliable narration. When Swift shows in Gulliver’s Travels the Lilliputians finding something “flat and even” and “hollow within”, they assume it is a mountain of some sort, but it turns out to be a hat. They are tiny next to the object they examine and Swift conveys its largeness relatively. For Daniel P Gunn, “to produce an effect of defamiliarization, then, an artist must consciously violate the accepted ways of making meanings whatever they are.” (The Iowa Review) This means viewing things in an unfamiliar way and often the simplest method of doing this is to offer a limited perspective that cannot quite familiarly see the world. When early in ‘A Time to Dance’, Nelson sees what it is like to be blind by trying on two eye patches, people pass him by and he notes “one of the footsteps even laughed.” It is an isolated example of defamiliarisation but it sets the tone for a story that holds firmly to Nelson’s limited point of view, evident when the narrator talks of Nelson’s mother and the “soft pop and rattle as she opened her capsules. Her ‘tantalisers’ she called them, small black and red torpedoes.” Whether this is her nickname for them or Nelson’s misapprehension, we have no doubt that these are tranquilisers and Nelson wouldn’t be aware of what that entails.

By the end of the story, Nelson is back in school: his mother drags him there and she has a chat with the deputy headmaster who turns out to be Irish and we discover as well that Nelson’s mum is from Northern Ireland. The deputy headmaster is sympathetic to her predicament, the mum stays, and Nelson goes to class. What happens in his absence we can’t know for sure because the book has throughout held to his perspective. In his presence, though there have been flirtatious suggestions, the way the mother asks to smoke a cigarette, the way she puts her knee up against the desk. The deputy headmaster is young and so a similar age to the mother.

The class Nelson goes to is on religious education and the teacher quotes a passage from the bible with its lines, “a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to wear down and a time to build…a time to mourn and a time to dance…” The school is the religiously named St John the Baptist and the time for dancing that Nelson has half-seen and half-understood was a baptism of sorts if we take it colloquially to mean an initiation. Nelson may not quite know what that means for a couple of years more but it is one of those events that can seem more consequential retrospectively than at the time, as the boy will come to understand his mum is a sex worker on anti-depressants, while he is well-aware of being a truant with a squint eye. It is a story full of pathos but MacLaverty’s achievement is to allow us to view it too as a tale of two hypocrites who want to keep from each other what they do with their days. MacLaverty asks us not to judge but to allow the sadness to seep in

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

A Time to Dance

Bernard MacLaverty is an Irish writer with a “Belfast accent, which has never left him, despite having lived and worked in Edinburgh, Glasgow and, remarkably, Islay in the Inner Hebrides.” (The Irish Voice) He may have lived for many years in Scotland but much of his work has focused on Ireland or alludes to the country, including his five novels, Cal, Lamb, Grace Notes, The Anatomy School and Midwinter Break. MacLaverty is still very much seen as an Irish writer rather than a Scottish one and yet a story like 'A Time to Dance' manages to capture the city, Edinburgh, in which it is set, while also making clear the main characters are very much from elsewhere.

 ‘A Time to Dance’ is perhaps a perfect short story, a small contained work that manages to evoke Edinburgh while invoking Ireland, to conjure up childhood without ignoring a mother’s concerns, and is yet another Scottish tale about an absent father. (Celia, On the Island, Shuggie Bain). It also reaches into myth with a story of blindness that is likely to bring to mind Oedipus, and concludes with a biblical quotation from Ecclesiastes. It is also sensorially rich and offers too the occasional examples of witty defamiliarisation and restricted, even unreliable narration.

Here young Nelson is in the first year of secondary school - or would be if he turned up. Much of the time he is skiving, a continuation it seems of his primary school avoidance where his mother almost went to court over his absences. The story doesn’t make much of this avoidance, but we can glean from it that Nelson is a solitary child with poor sight, who has to wear a patch to protect his eyes. MacLaverty doesn’t tell us the disease but we can work it for ourselves based on the name of the patches he has to wear: Opticludes which are worn when people have amblyopia, weak vision in one eye, or basically a squint. If Oedipus blinds himself late in life realising that he has slept with his mother and killed his father, Nelson has poor eyesight early in life but, in a way, this is Oedipus Rex retold.

Nelson’s father is absent and his mother desirable: when she sees him wandering along Princes Street avoiding school one day she grabs him off the streets and is compelled to keep him in her company while she briefly goes off to work. She is employed as a stripper in a bar and we discover this fact through Nelson’s senses. His mum insists he hides away in a small room as she gets changed before going into the main area, and throughout she insists he wears two eyepatches so he doesn’t see her getting undressed nor sees her doing so all over again for the punters. But when she performs, he removes the eye patches and sees her clothes in front of him: “he looked up at his mother’s things, hanging on the hook; her tights and drawers were as she wore them, but inside out and hanging knock-kneed on top of everything. In her bag he found her blonde wig and tried it on, smelling the perfume of it as he did so.” Nelson has a glamorous mum, one who can make money taking her clothes off and receives wolf-whistles from the sixth form when she takes him back to school after her performance. “Nelson felt a flush of pride that she was causing a stir. She was dressed in black satiny jeans, very tight, and her pink blouse was knotted, leaving her tanned midriff bare.” 

While the sixth-form boys know exactly what they find appealing, Nelson’s feelings will be more ambivalent. MacLaverty conveys them in a balance between the sensual and the sensuous, between the sexual and the non-sexual. Nelson probably doesn’t desire his mother like the older boys at school but he is fascinated with the senses her presence allows. “At home he liked nosying around his mother’s room, smelling all her bottles of make-up; seeing her spangled things.” When she returns from performing for the men in the bar, he notes “the smoke from the cigarette in her mouth trickled up into her eye and she held it half shut. Nelson could see the bright points of sweat shining through her make-up…she smelt of drink.” She is clearly a sensuous presence in Nelson’s life, but while the sixth-formers probably have a strong sense of her as a desirable object and a bit of a liability as she comes in no doubt still smelling of alcohol, Nelson is probably trying to make sense of what he is supposed to feel. While Oedipus knows that he wants to kill a man and sleep with a woman, the problem rests on not knowing that the man he kills is his father and the woman he sleeps with his mother. He is saved from ambivalence by ignorance, and tragedy ensues. Nelson’s drama is a bit more unassuming than that, but it allows MacLaverty the opportunity to defamiliarise and narratively restrict. 

In the first instance, we have a child’s like view of events, the sort of defamiliarisation Swift and Tolstoy often practise and that can seem close to unreliable narration. When Swift shows in Gulliver’s Travels the Lilliputians finding something “flat and even” and “hollow within”, they assume it is a mountain of some sort, but it turns out to be a hat. They are tiny next to the object they examine and Swift conveys its largeness relatively. For Daniel P Gunn, “to produce an effect of defamiliarization, then, an artist must consciously violate the accepted ways of making meanings whatever they are.” (The Iowa Review) This means viewing things in an unfamiliar way and often the simplest method of doing this is to offer a limited perspective that cannot quite familiarly see the world. When early in ‘A Time to Dance’, Nelson sees what it is like to be blind by trying on two eye patches, people pass him by and he notes “one of the footsteps even laughed.” It is an isolated example of defamiliarisation but it sets the tone for a story that holds firmly to Nelson’s limited point of view, evident when the narrator talks of Nelson’s mother and the “soft pop and rattle as she opened her capsules. Her ‘tantalisers’ she called them, small black and red torpedoes.” Whether this is her nickname for them or Nelson’s misapprehension, we have no doubt that these are tranquilisers and Nelson wouldn’t be aware of what that entails.

By the end of the story, Nelson is back in school: his mother drags him there and she has a chat with the deputy headmaster who turns out to be Irish and we discover as well that Nelson’s mum is from Northern Ireland. The deputy headmaster is sympathetic to her predicament, the mum stays, and Nelson goes to class. What happens in his absence we can’t know for sure because the book has throughout held to his perspective. In his presence, though there have been flirtatious suggestions, the way the mother asks to smoke a cigarette, the way she puts her knee up against the desk. The deputy headmaster is young and so a similar age to the mother.

The class Nelson goes to is on religious education and the teacher quotes a passage from the bible with its lines, “a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to wear down and a time to build…a time to mourn and a time to dance…” The school is the religiously named St John the Baptist and the time for dancing that Nelson has half-seen and half-understood was a baptism of sorts if we take it colloquially to mean an initiation. Nelson may not quite know what that means for a couple of years more but it is one of those events that can seem more consequential retrospectively than at the time, as the boy will come to understand his mum is a sex worker on anti-depressants, while he is well-aware of being a truant with a squint eye. It is a story full of pathos but MacLaverty’s achievement is to allow us to view it too as a tale of two hypocrites who want to keep from each other what they do with their days. MacLaverty asks us not to judge but to allow the sadness to seep in


© Tony McKibbin