| Title | : | Looking for the Possible Dance |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 256 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1993 |
| Awards | : | Somerset Maugham Award (1994) |
Looking for the Possible Dance Reviews
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This is a sucky love story with a lot of coochycoo cutesy dialogue between much put-upon Margaret and intense-but-unreliable Colin (yeah, I know I left you for nine months without a word and I’m back with absolutely no explanation but I’m back and that’s what counts, why the long face?). I quickly realised this first I’m-betting-very-autobiographical novel by AL Kennedy was not my cup of tea but heck, it’s in 1001 Books You Must Read By the End of Next Year, Our Enforcement Teams will be in Your Area Shortly so I thought some people think this is pretty good, maybe this nasty mawkish father-daughter relationship will end soon (it does, he dies) and we’ll get on to something more interesting (we don’t, after daddy comes Colin).
There is a most nauseating scene which features both daddy and Colin. Yes, daddy is long dead, but that doesn’t stop our sentimental sunbeam Margaret. So Colin has just proposed marriage, which for him was like pulling teeth –
"I won’t change for you. I’ll change because time passes and I’ll change for us, or even because of you, but never for you. … I’ll wear what I wear and do the things I do. … I’m marrying you for you. Because I like you."
truly, it’s enough to sweep any girl off her feet – anyway Margaret reacts curiously :
She turned her head to one side then tilted it up, “Daddy? Daddy, this is Colin. It would be very nice if you liked him because I do. We would like him to be my husband.”
Daddy does not materialise from beyond the grave to give his ghostly blessing but Colin squeezes her hand very tightly and they both cry buckets. A few pages later Margaret says
"Oh God, I do love you, Colin, you’re beautiful. You are beautiful. I want you take you home with me. I want to eat you up. All of you. Darling, I do love you.”
To which he replies
"Eat me up then. Eat me up."
What, kidneys, liver, spleen, everything? No wait, I’m taking it too literally. This is lurve-talk. Which I think is best kept private, and not faithfully transcribed into your first novel.
In order to convince readers that this is not just a sucky lurve story, A L Kennedy shoehorns a gruesome scene of violence in towards the end, and poor Colin ends up in the hospital with big bandages. But don’t fret, droopy Margaret is there to coo and weep over his manly damage -
"Darling. Ssshhh. I love you as much as I want to now, and you can’t stop me. You know that? You can’t do a thing about it.”
Well, when she’s out of the room I guess he could drag his maimed body over to the window and hurl himself out. That would be my suggestion. -
Learn yerself Scotch Part One (With A.L Kennedy and shovelmonkey1)
Greet - Cry
Stovies - Type of meat stew with potatoes, onions and other root veg
Ken - Know
Nip yer head - to nag someone
Gub - to hit or smack
Wean / Wee yun - child
Birl - to spin
Git yer hole - to get laid
For Part Two, Intermediate Scotch, please see Morvern Callar by Alan Werner.
For Part Three, Hard core Scotch, please see Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh.
Set in an indeterminate Scottish City (Glasgow), A.L Kennedy leads us on our own dance through the highs and lows of Maggies existence focusing on the way her life and her decisions are moulded by the two most important men in her life; her father and her lover, the inimitable Colin McCloag. The lightness of the dance is cloaked in the heaviness of living and dying, where living is just getting by and dying is painful and unglamorous. As the book slowly but surely heads towards its crescendo of gangland violence (meted out in a way that is possibly unique to Glasgee dockland gangsters) and Maggies world unravels, it becomes clear that, in life, when looking for the possible dance, the dance is only really possible with two. -
This time, a Scottish author. A she. Younger than myself. Can this be categorized as a "chic lit"? I think so. Margaret has two important men in her life: her father (never knew her mother, left when she was just a baby) and her lover Colin (make this into a movie and this character would surely be Colin Farrell--he's cute and love to fuck, and say "fuck"). A brilliant intro, Margaret and her father in a dance. I keep thinking: was this the inspiration for that song by Luther Vandross which has the refrain "...to dance with my father again"? Och, dunno. This wee detail, nae important. It canny subtract anything from this beautiful love story, no shite. Aye, go ahead hen, read this. You gonny like it too!
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I love A.L. Kennedy’s first short story collection. Looking For the Possible Dance is not that collection.
For starters, it does not contain my favorite short story, “Star Dust.” It is also not titled Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains. Looking For the Possible Dance is, however, Kennedy’s first novel, but it’s missing all the parts that made me love her shorter works. Unfortunately, it even reads like a grossly overextended short story and that just doesn’t work. Novels are all about what you put on the page; short stories are what you leave out, so Looking For the Possible Dance winds up feeling terribly lacking. Some might try to cover this with pleas of minimalism, but it’s beyond that. It’s not functional. Where a short story can take a feeling and pull it out with little plot, novels don’t have that grace—not outside of mere snippets—and Kennedy spends too long not going anywhere.
Since there’s no jacket summary, I went into Looking For the Possible Dance blind. It’s about a Scottish woman, Margaret, who misses her deceased father and has a seemingly unstable relationship with her lover, Colin. (This is the second book in a row that I—a Colin—have read with a character named Colin. Must some kind of sub-conscious ego trip, especially since I didn’t much care for either character.) She works at a community center that’s going to put on a cèilidh (pronounced “kay-lee”)—a traditional Gaelic dance with folk music. Sidenote: A cèilidh is the only time I wear underwear underneath my kilt. Otherwise with all that fierce dancing—and yelling: yeah, Scots yell while they dance—everyone ends up seeing a felony.
Anyway, there’s also an odd timeline, as Margaret also spends much of the novel on a train with a special needs character, James, and most of the plot is a flashback. It was disappointing how little there was to enjoy here, but I kept reading for a few key reasons: 1) There were occasionally great short stories in here still (one about a man at the dentist who talks about killing people and another about a girl who walks through a window at a café); 2) I’d catch moments of those feeling passages I enjoyed in Kennedy’s early short works; and 3) there was a blurb on the back about a moment of climactic violence. Alas, that violent moment doesn’t really fit with the rest of the mild-mannered story, so that plot adrenaline is wasted. Finally, although I enjoyed the way the father is portrayed in the early part of the novel (and the inevitable tie to Margaret's relationship with Colin), he all but disappears from the latter half. Alas, it's just one more piece of scrap that doesn't function in Looking For the Possible Dance. One star. -
An interesting, well written, engaging, sad, short, eventful, memorable, powerful novel about a young woman named Margaret, her father and her boyfriend Colin. Margaret has had a special relationship with her father. Her mother disappeared when Margaret was very young. Her relationship with Colin is complicated as Margaret wants to be independent and work for a living. Colin has other ideas. Margaret's relationship with her boss unsettles her, as the boss is expecting more from her on a personal level. Towards the end of the novel a tragic event occurs.
This is the author's first novel. The book was first published in 1993. -
4.5 stars
Margaret is grieving- the loss of her father, who was her hero. The loss of her job- even though she was not suited for it and her boss was horrible. And the possibility of losing her relationship with her true love, Colin.
This story starts almost at the end-Margaret is on a train to London, thinking and remembering. While on the train she meets James, an otherly abled boy with an uncanny ability to see through her, and they become friends. While their encounter is brief, he affects her.
The spoilers in this book aren’t the beginning and end, but the events in the middle. For 250 pages, it packs a lot in: father-daughter relationships, the difficulty of maturing and falling in love, and the working world, especially self-serving bosses. It touches on feminism, activism, racism, and sexism, as well as assumptions made about those who have physical or mental disabilities. It shows what can happen in the real world when we stand up for what’s right.
And Kennedy does all of this with such a deft hand, the reader doesn’t catch it until a few pages later, when everything meshes. I can’t believe this was her first novel.
There is some swearing, and at times it can be hard to catch the transitions. All in all, a very good, and surprising gem. -
Not quite sure. Margaret has an extremely close relationship with her father and a confusing one with her boyfriend. She has a job she hates with a lecherous boss. The boyfriend is beaten up and crucified. Why is that in the story. Bits of interest and some confusion.
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If I can say one thing about Looking for the Possible Dance, that it is definitely not a summer read. It’s bleak, sad with one uplifting moment. However if you put this aside and let the novel take over you then you’ll find that it is a marvellous piece of writing.
Margaret is on a train from Scotland to London and she spends the rest of the novel (with some very brief chapters on the present) gathering all the events which brought her on this train. The main culprit – if I can say that – lies within relationships.
At first she dissects the relationship with her father, then to her boyfriend Colin and then her boss Mr. Lawrence and all of them end in some type of failure. Her father dies , Colin leaves her cause Margaret doesn’t want to devote herself fully to him and Mr. Lawrence fires her due to some frame up and his neuroticisms. As the novel progresses Colin puts Margaret in an ethical dilemma, which could be seen as a sly nod to politics. By the end of the novel Margaret receives the redemption she has been seeking and this is the only uplifting section of the whole book.
This is my first A.L. Kennedy and I’ve noticed that the writing style is not dissimilar to Patrick McCabe. Both have that storytelling air and both fuse in politics while doing this. Kennedy is more realistic and in a funny way more human in her portrayal of characters.
If I can say this I notice that Scottish writers have a tendency to depict reality in a harsh way – James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Alasdair Gray (well two parts of Lanark anyways) and so on. So I guess it would be safe to say that Looking for .. is a Scottish novel through and through. -
This novel is about a young woman who was raised by a single father to whom she was devoted. He's since died and, though deeply attached to her boyfriend, she also struggles with their intimacy. All of this is made more interesting (to me, at least), by the fact that they are working class people who live in Scotland.
This isn't literally the first novel I've read by a Scottish author, but they've been few and far between, and the first thing I noticed about this novel is that Scotland is not England. Seems as though it would be self-evident, but I'm embarrassed to say it wasn't, quite. The landscape is different, the customs are different, the slang is different, and having read dozens (hundreds?) of so-called British novels didn't familiarize me with the territory.
It's a short book with short chapters and to do it justice it should be read rapidly, which is not how I read it. I always read several books at a time and on this occasion travel also interrupted me. The characters and their situations were interesting, but it moves fairly slowly at the beginning. The last forty pages are gripping, however, and well worth the leisurely build-up. -
I'm not sure whether young Scottish authors are a little over represented in the list, or whether it's just skewed towards the kind of books I can find in a charity shop up here. Either way, A.L. Kennedy is one of the above. Looking for the possible dance is the story of Margaret, a university educated girl who returns home to Glasgow and tries to make her way in a world with few opportunities and a serious lack of privilege. Central to the story are the two men in her life, her father and her boyfriend, and the contribution they make to personality and prospects. It was an interesting story but one I never felt quite take off, until the ending, which was unexpected and jarred a little with the rhythm of the rest of the book. Not a bad read, but I wouldn't rush to pick up another of her novels very quickly.
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Not often that you read this voice: working class Scottish funny/capable/kind/hard woman. This book is about a lot of things and you can feel the attention and care that's gone into carving it out. It definitely feels pretty heavy and dense although it's funny too. The dialogue isn't "simple" or "confusing" as some folk on here seem to be saying. It's just subtle (and Scottish). Little moments of caring and oppression. Loving is holding - unfreeing and secure. Good to read about a woman thinking about her dad and her boyfriend in the same space. I'll read this again and probably read it differently then. -
Short but very readable book. Centred on Margaret, sometimes Maggie, youngish, Scottish, it illuminates various relationships that shape her life. Although much of the book is concerned with the relationship between Margaret and her boyfriend Colin it's the relationship she had with her late father that has shaped her and there are other great examples of interactions between co-workers, strangers on trains and so on.
I enjoyed it very much, in a way it seemed to ramble on without a plot but seemed like a coherent whole by the end of the book. -
This novel read like the building of a house of cards, from several randomly-selected packs, the idea - the main aim - being just to pleasurably pass some time. The randomness I found slightly excessive. The ending, with everything crashed and needing massive effort to heal, pick up, pack up and start again, throat-achingly overwhelming.
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I got a hold of some of Kennedy's short stories, and loved them, but the book was a bit lacking, and took some sharp changes in plot and directional tone that seemed to be either overly reactive or where two ideas had come together but not been joined quite properly.
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The first of her books I read and loved.
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Not absolutely awful, but I definitely won't remember this book the week after next.
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heartbreaking and beautiful
