"Invitation to the Waltz" by Rosamund Lehman

A coming-of-age novel about a romantic young girl going to her first ball.

Seventeen-year-old Olivia is the younger daughter of a well-to-do middle-class family in the depths of the English countryside shortly after the end of the First World War. She has been invited to her first dance at the nearby stately home. The first half of this novel explores her preparations for this coming-of-age event, her hopes and her dreams; the second half chronicles the big night itself.

There's not really any plot. Instead, we experience Olivia's inner monologue in an almost stream of consciousness way as she encounters a strong of eccentric characters including poor relative Uncle Oswald, name-calling village children, a lady who makes dresses (poorly), a potentially lascivious colonel, a wannabe curate and, at the dance itself, a self-obsessed radical poet, a blinded ex-soldier, another lascivious old man, and the man of the house with whom she discusses literature. It's almost a picaresque. Meantime her sister falls in love.

The characterisation of the protagonist, Olivia, seen from inside, is faultless; despite the fact that the timeline is compressed into just over a week, her character learns and develops. The elder sister, Kate, is a more mature counterpoint. Most of the other characters are eccentric caricatures, unimportant in themselves, but each one teaches Olivia something about life.

It is set firmly in its social class, a world of big houses run by servants (one described as having "the flat strong heels of service"; 3.15), of mostly subservient villagers, and of the patronage of genteel persons less fortunate than oneself. Olivia has a moment of realisation about the plight of the woman in the village who makes dresses for her: "For the first time, Mrs Robinson's life rose up objectively and faced her. Olivia saw it with dismay, with guilt. She made frocks for other girls to dance in." (1.3) On the other hand the tribe of sweep's children are experienced as if they are from another species: "Their eyes were sharp, bright, hard, rats' eyes above high sharp cheekbones, their lips long, thin and flat, their skulls narrowed and curiously knobbed. They didn't look like other people's children. They had hardly any hair; and undersized frames with square high shoulders, almost like hunchbacks, and frail legs." (1.5) But there is no thought at the ball that all these people are fundamentally parasites, living on the backs of those who labour on the land they own.

The prose is beautiful. The social setting and the writing style reminded me strongly of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway which was published seven years earlier so may well have been an influence. Another story with a similar heroine, set in the world of genteel impoverishment (but much funnier) is Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. 

Selected quotes:

• "She felt the quiver of the warm sun-drained air like the swim and beat of pulses in soft nervous agitation. Roses and leaves breathed in the window; and the evening bird voices seemed to circle with exultant serenity down the sky." (1.2) Beautiful? Or over-ornamented, trying too hard? I rather like evening as 'sun-drained' but I am not sure if pulses 'swim' or leaves 'breathe'.
• "Bournemouth was a gay place in those days. I dare say it still is." (1.2)
• "She wouldn't get a husband; she hadn't a chance now. She was thirty. Letting I dare not wait upon I would, youth had gone by." (1.3) In Shakespeare's Macbeth, Lady M says to the eponymous antihero "Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,'. Like the poor cat i' the adage?" (Act One Scene 7) in order to encourage him to commit murder and treason.
• "Custom could never stale the Brighton gentleman" (1.3) Hard on the heels of one Shakespearean quote comes another, this time from Antony and Cleopatra, in which Enobarbus, describing Cleopatra, says: "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety"
• "He died of softening. I'm sorry for anyone who has to nurse softening. Dreadful - so disgusting." (1.3)
• "There in the distance was Mrs Wells-Straker, widow of widows, flowing, streaming towards the church in all her crepe." (1.4)
• "The camel face of Mr Blenskinsop (university coach), his mingling of subacidity, sawdust wit and cowering defensive bachelor ceremony." (1.4)
• "Boys and girls had dropped ink on the faded carpet, puppies had contributed yellowish maps." (1.9)
• "It was a certain sign of growing up that one no longer loved the snow; no longer wished to rush out and stamp in it and throw it about." (1.10)
• "He was not exactly ugly, they thought; but one might be alone with him on a desert island for ten years without ever being able to bear to kiss him." (2.1)
• "Fumble about a bit, I expect - you know, feel your muscle and mess about with your hands pretending he's a fortune-teller, and meaure how tall you were against him - that sort of feeble pawing. It's a sort of disease old men get." (3.14) Almost every old man in this novel, as seen through a young girl's eyes, is inappropriate and lascivious.
• "Everything's going to begin. A hare sitting up in the grass took fright, darting ahead of her into the ploughed land. The rooks flew up in a swirl from the furrows. All the landscape as far as the horizon seemed to begin to move. Wind was chasing cloud, and sun flew behind them. A winged gigantic runner with a torch was running from a great distance to meet her, swooping over the low hills, skimming from them veil after veil of shadow, touching them to instant ethereal shapes of light. On it came, over ploughed field and fallow. The rooks flashed sharply, the hare and his shadow swerved in sudden sunlight. In a moment it would be everywhere. Here it was. She ran into it." (3.25; last sentences).

July 2024; 232 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God