Zadie Smith ‘Swing Time’

—She would not press play until she had Fred and Ginger exactly where she wanted them, on the balcony amongst the bougainvillea and the Doric columns at which point she began to read the danse as I never could, she saw everything the stray ostrich feathers hitting the floor, the weak muscles in Ginger’s back Fred had to jerk her up from any supine position spoiling the flow ruining the lines, she noticed the most important thing of all which was the dance lessons within the performance, with Fred and Ginger you can always see the danse lessons.

Swing time is the story of an unnamed narrator and the four female characters that influence her life up to the point at the end of the book where she is 33 years old and she finally takes the time to begin to question herself.

The First and foremost of the influences on her life is her childhood friend Tracy, from the initial quote, who lives on a nearby estate and who she meets at dancing classes, drawn together by their exact same skin colours:

—Tracey and I lined up next to each other, every time, it was almost unconscious, two iron filings drawn to a magnet.

The narrator is defined by what Tracy is and what she herself is not. Tracy is a gifted natural dancer, determined, earnest and speaks her mind about everything except her father, Louis, a local character no longer living at home, thrown out by Tracy’s mother. Tracy grows up becoming rebellious, getting in to a dancing school and drifting away from the narrator.

In parallel to friendship with Tracy, the narrators home life is in flux as her West Indian mother strives to exist through education in a single minded climb through learning obtaining a university degree, becoming a local councillor and then a member of parliament, the price to pay is her lack of time for her family, her husband leaves home and her lack of empathy towards and time for her daughter who spends more time with Tracey:

—I was not a dancer at all –although I took too much pride in my singing, in a manner I knew my mother found obnoxious. Singing came naturally to me, but things that came naturally to females did not impress my mother, not at all. In her view you might as well be proud of breathing or walking or giving birth.

The story then moves on to its second phase as Tracey begins to get secondary roles in west end musicals, the narrator’s Mother goes through a relationship with the ‘Notable Activist’ and then lives with her assistant, Miriam. As this happens our Narrator begins a ten year role as a personal assistant to Aimee, a mega rich superstar traveling the world on private jets, to ensure that Aimee can be free to live her life in the full whilst ensuring that the narrator can have no life of her own. Aimee unfettered by day to day life, all taken care of by her assistants, moves seamlessly from one idea or obsession to next, one in particular will take up a good deal of the narrator’s  time, a school for young girls in The Gambia:

—Governments are useless they can’t be trusted Aimee explained to me and charities have their own agenda, churches care more for souls than for bodies and so if we want to see real change is this world….well then we ourselves have to be the ones to do it, we have to be the change we want to see. By we she meant people like herself of financial means and global reach who happen to love freedom and equality, want justice, feel an obligation to do something good with their own fortunes. It was a moral category but also an economic one and if you followed its logic all the way to the end of the revolving belt then after a few miles you arrived at a new idea that wealth and morality are in essence the same thing therefore the more money a person had then the more goodness or potential for goodness a person possessed.

The fourth female character to influence her life is Hawa, a young teacher at the village school in The Gambia, a young balanced woman, happy with the simple village life she lives and the gossip that goes with it, Hawa as the other strong female characters in the book are shown as contrasts to the narrator who nonetheless sees her as having some things in common with her. Hawa is however ten years younger than her and as this final quote shows cannot avoid her destiny to marry, which again is seen through the narrator’s reaction:

—I couldn’t rid myself of a nagging sense of error that having misread everything beginning with Hawa who opened the door of her compound wearing a new scarf, black that covered her head and stopped half way down her torso and a long shapeless shirt, the kind she had always ridiculed when we saw them in the market, she hugged me as firmly as ever….oh sister good news I am getting married. I hugged her and felt the familiar smile fasten itself on my face the same one that I wore in London and New York in the face of similar news and I experienced the same sense of acute betrayal, I was ashamed to feel that way but couldn’t help it a piece of my heart closed against her.

The wheel eventually turns full circle with Tracy bringing up her children in her childhood flat, no longer able to dance, still angry, an anger that in her case gives her a certain balance and the narrator having stepped off of the treadmill with only questions before her. Finally it is only the narrator that seems to have an acute sense of observation but no character, a shame for the book.

First published in English as ‘Swing Time’ by Hamish Hamilton in 2016