In contrast to the three women who shape her through childhood to early middle age, the female narrator of Zadie Smith’s fifth novel is so insipid, she doesn’t even bother to tell us her name. Her mother, a beautiful Jamaican-born feminist, autodidact and activist who resembles Nefertiti, delegates parenting to her less ambitious husband while she plots her escape from the confines of gender, race and class. She barely tolerates our narrator’s intense friendship with Tracey, the only other brown-skinned girl at their North London dancing class. With her doting, but foul-mouthed white English mother and absent African Caribbean father (whom the little girl claims is on tour with Michael Jackson, when he’s actually in prison), Tracey’s allotment of advantage and disadvantage mirrors hers. Their relationship pirouettes around a shared passion and a suppressed mutual envy: while Tracey has the skill and talent to make it to the stage, the narrator’s relative stability with a loving father provide some compensation for her flat feet.
The girls drift apart in late adolescence. After a media studies degree at a third-rate university, the narrator falls into a job as personal assistant to mega popstar Aimee, a character with echoes of Madonna, whose career seems to soar as Tracey’s stagnates. In time, with neither music nor motherhood proving sufficient to contain her energy, ambition and ego, Aimee decides to build a school for girls in a deprived West African village whose men are deserting the "back way" or renouncing music and dance for a religious life. While the narrator is sceptical of her employer’s assumption that her wealth and creativity can fix world poverty, she comes to cherish her periodic visits to their adopted community. But, when things turn sour, which of these four women will emerge with their well-being and reputation intact?
Against a backing track of music, dance, and the ethics of celebrity philanthropy, Swing Time examines the subtle distinctions of race and class in Britain (or perhaps north-west London) across the last three decades within an engaging tale of ambition and failure. Peppered with the author’s characteristic wit, it’s an engrossing read although, in the current climate, I would have welcomed something slightly more challenging. Nevertheless, thanks to Hamish Hamilton for my advance proof copy.
Against a backing track of music, dance, and the ethics of celebrity philanthropy, Swing Time examines the subtle distinctions of race and class in Britain (or perhaps north-west London) across the last three decades within an engaging tale of ambition and failure. Peppered with the author’s characteristic wit, it’s an engrossing read although, in the current climate, I would have welcomed something slightly more challenging. Nevertheless, thanks to Hamish Hamilton for my advance proof copy.
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