Despite the teetering book piles, Lynne's post about Richard Burns' A Dance for the Moon
I wrote last week about a very different book, John Waller's A Time to Dance, A Time to Die, and a passage in that which particularly caught my attention was then dramatised perfectly in Richard Burns' novel. Talking about shell-shock in the 1914-18 war, John Waller writes "...not everyone expressed the horror of attritional conflict in the same manner. Battlefront doctors were convinced that when nerves of officers and infantrymen snapped, they did so in very different ways....[a hysterical response] may just not have been an option for an officer class schooled in the absolute necessity for self-composure and emotional restraint."
"A Dance for the Moon" tells the story of one young officer, the poet David Goodchild, sent to a sanatorium run by the progressive psychiatrist Dr. Penn. While David is at Winfell for the repair of his "broken mind", Dr.Penn and his wife Mary are keen to unravel the psychopathology of poetry, encouraging him to write and gently coaxing out memories and reflections in an attempt to heal. Meanwhile, ordinary soldier Jack Brough works nearby on the railway. His refuge from his war experience is a close relationship with the bottle: "Officers got shell-shock; privates got drunk", and his loathing of Winfell and all it stands for leads ultimately to dreadful consequences.
It's a book about fragility, and not just the fragile minds of damaged men, but of life and love too. It contrasts modernity with the traditional and the comfortably understood, and it is underpinned by the enormous power of a failing or failure to break what appeared to be securely whole. The reader witnesses some truly painful scenes, all based on what really did happen to those who saw the worst of war, but it's a poet at work here and the pathos is brought out with marked sensitivity. At the risk of being pedantic and critical, I spotted an anachronism and a few pale purple passages, but I can accept those minor slips in what is otherwise a skilfully constructed, beautifully, economically written book, and a real find.
Why is it out of print?
