The Ballroom and Wake

Two novels by Anna Hope, read in succession.  The debut novel following her second:

The Ballroom 

Compelling, elegant and insightful' Observer'Beautifully wrought, tender, heartbreaking' Sunday Express 5/5
'Moving, fascinating' Times
'A tender and absorbing love story' Daily Mail
'Unsentimental and affecting' Sunday Times
'Exquisitely good' Metro


1911: Inside an asylum at the edge of the Yorkshire moors,
where men and women are kept apart
by high walls and barred windows,
there is a ballroom vast and beautiful.
For one bright evening every week
they come together
and dance.
When John and Ella meet
It is a dance that will change
two lives forever.

Set over the heatwave summer of 1911, the end of the Edwardian era, The Ballroom is a historical love story. It tells a page-turning tale of dangerous obsession, of madness and sanity, and of who gets to decide which is which.

The Guardian review

In 1908, when the newly appointed home secretary Winston Churchill arrived in office, one of the social problems he was given to solve was that of the “feeble-minded” – individuals deemed incapable of self-sufficiency who often ended up in workhouses or prisons. Over the next two years, Churchill became increasingly favourable towards arguments for compulsory sterilisation, going so far as to circulate pamphlets on the subject among his cabinet colleagues.

Churchill’s ambitions for compulsory sterilisation ultimately failed but with the increased influence of the Eugenics Society, in 1913 the Mental Deficiency Act established powers to incarcerate those believed to be “feeble-minded” in purpose-built asylums, where men and women were segregated, ensuring their inability to reproduce without the need for controversial medical interventions.

Dr Charles Fuller's own troubled unconscious life leads him to fantasies of grandeur that have disastrous consequences

It is this fascinating historical backdrop that forms the basis of Anna Hope’s compelling second novel, The Ballroom. It begins with the arrival of Ella Fay at the Sharston asylum in 1911, her supposed “madness” being the breaking of a window in the textile factory where she works. Meanwhile, in the men’s wing sits John Mulligan, an Irishman suffering from depression provoked by the death of his daughter and the dissolution of his marriage. When Ella and John meet at a Friday night dance in the asylum’s unexpectedly beautiful ballroom, their feelings for one another transcend the restraints of their surroundings in what becomes a poignant and sensitive love story. The trio of voices narrating the novel is completed by Dr Charles Fuller, a failed medic and ambitious eugenicist, whose own complex and troubled unconscious life leads him to fantasies of grandeur that have disastrous consequences for Ella and John.

The Ballroom is shot through with insidious violence – that witnessed by Ella against her mother at the hands of her father: “She had been small, sitting with her back on hot stone. Inside, she had heard the thud of fist on flesh. Her mother crying, a low, animal sound”; that experienced by Ella as an eight-year-old working in the textile factory; and that imposed on asylum patients who are unable or unwilling to comply. And then there is the violence the patients inflict on themselves when language fails them and freedom is denied to them. Hope treats her subject – and her characters – with the care of an attentive therapist, imbuing the novel with psychological and emotional depth. Even Charles – arguably madder than most of the inmates – is portrayed by Hope with impressive understanding.

Hope skilfully and subtly deconstructs our notions of madness, revealing how inextricably linked those definitions are to questions of class and gender. Ella knows her only chance of escaping the asylum is to “be good… She knew about being good. Had known it since she was small. Being good was surviving.” She allows contemporary resonances to filter through the narrative: when Charles attends a meeting of the Eugenics Society, the speech he hears – railing against the rights of those in receipt of poor relief to reproduce – sounds disturbingly familiar to the arguments of far-right voices in our own age.

As with Hope’s highly acclaimed debut novel, Wake, the writing is elegant and insightful; she writes beautifully about human emotion, landscape and weather: “There was no wind. It was as though they were all simmering under the great grey lid of the sky, like water almost brought to boil.”

Like all successful historical novels, The Ballroom tells us a story of the past in order to shed light on the present. As Charles proclaims at one point: “The future was coming. Even here. Even here in this island ship of souls, cast away on the green-brown seas of the moor, even here it would find its way through.”

What I wrote to a fellow reader:

"Thanks so much, Jane, for recommending The Ballroom.  You were a bit hesitant as you had not read it but I have to say I found it a brilliant read.  Sure it was a love story as it said on the tin, but so much more and I thought the author steered her way to the conclusion skilfully, keeping her reader wondering how a 'satisfactory' ending could be achieved as I felt it could not be a traditional happy ending, nor would it all end in tears.  Well, tears of misery anyway.  It did end in tears of another kind for me as I listened to the narrator Daniel Weyman (who is so good on Audible) read the letter that John had written to Ella. I am going to write it up for my blog when I can find a minute amidst all the last minute preps.  Hope you are on top of things chez vous!

Wake

Five Days in November, 1920: As the body of the Unknown Soldier makes its way home from the fields of Northern France, three women are dealing with loss in their own way: Hettie, who dances for sixpence a waltz at the Hammersmith Palais; Evelyn, who toils at a job in the pensions office, and Ada, a housewife who is beset by visions of her dead son.

One day a young man comes to her door. He carries with him a wartime mystery that will bind these women together and will both mend and tear their hearts. A portrait of three intertwining lives caught at the faultline between empire and modernity, Wake captures the beginnings of a new era, and the day the mood of the nation changed for ever. 

Goodreads website says:

A brilliant debut for readers of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, in which three women must deal with the aftershocks of WWI and its impact on the men in their lives—a son, a brother and a lover. Their tragic connection is slowly revealed as the book unfolds.

Wake: 1) Emerge or cause to emerge from sleep 2) Ritual for the dead 3) Consequence or aftermath.

Hettie, a dance instructress at the Palais, lives at home with her mother and her brother, mute and lost after his return from the war. One night, at work, she meets a wealthy, educated man and has reason to think he is as smitten with her as she is with him. Still there is something distracted about him, something she cannot reach...Evelyn works at the Pensions Exchange through which thousands of men have claimed benefits from wounds or debilitating distress. Embittered by her own loss, more and more estranged from her posh parents, she looks for solace in her adored brother who has not been the same since he returned from the front...Ada is beset by visions of her son on every street, convinced he is still alive. Helpless, her loving husband of 25 years has withdrawn from her. Then one day a young man appears at her door with notions to peddle, like hundreds of out of work veterans. But when he shows signs of being seriously disturbed—she recognizes the symptoms of "shell shock"—and utters the name of her son she is jolted to the core...

The lives of these three women are braided together, their stories gathering tremendous power as the ties that bind them become clear, and the body of the unknown soldier moves closer and closer to its final resting place.

What I thought:

A story of three women’s life experiences as Britain surfaces after the Great War.  With a well-drawn cast of supporting characters I thought.  I did enjoy this book.  As I was drawn further and further into the story I recognised that although here was yet another novel set around the First World War, the structure, unfolding and telling of the story (the stories of the three women protagonists) was indeed novel, engaging and as the characters were bit by bit fleshed out by the author, they became credible people.  Towards the end I was very moved by the account that a war-traumatised Private delivered to one of the three female principals.  As he recounts the last moments of a fellow soldier who is executed for desertion and who calls out for his mother, I wept buckets because, having sons, I think now of all those mothers who gave birth to and reared their sons (and daughters too of course) in great optimism for their future lives, only to be cut down as they had barely matured into young men.  Those generals in their tents, their field headquarters where they conducted the war, in relative safety, pushing their soldiers around for King and country, like so many chess pieces on a board, I feel such anger when I am reminded of it.  The more I read of episodes like this in the literature, the sadder it makes me each time.  I thought the narrative as it related to the choosing of the Unknown Warrior and his transfer to Britain and the burial gave a fascinating thread to run through the book because I did not know the background and I had not really imagined that there was a real body under the tomb in Westminster Abbey.  (needless to say you can read all about it on Wiki!) 

I do think carefully about who of my fellow readers will want to read novels such as this one by Anna Hope’s.  Someone once said, none of us Splinter I think, "Not another book about the World War…….".  But I thought a recommendation was called for because the writing is really good, the text flows, it is full of humanity and it is an excellent debut too.