Holy Smoke. By Anna and Jane Campion. Bloomsbury. 259pp. £14.99 in UK
This joint novel by the film-making Campion sisters, Jane of The Piano fame and Anna of the considerably-less-famous Loaded, focuses on Ruth Baron, a standard-issue leggy Australian 20-year-old who goes to India to "find herself". Whereupon - quicker than you can say "dodgy didgeridoo" - she finds herself wrapped in a sari and preparing, not just to join a cult, but to marry its ancient and less-than-venerable leader. Back home, her despairing parents call in P.J. Waters, a tough-talking "exit counsellor", whose preferred method of sorting out confused young cult devotees is to incarcerate them somewhere inaccessible for three days and play mind games with them.
This could have been a seriously engrossing novel on subjects of perennial fascination - brainwashing, maturity, faith, psychology, the nature of infatuation. Alas, as things hot up between Ruth and P.J. in a remote cabin in the Australian desert, any attempt at an intelligent examination of the issues - or even a plot - is chucked out the window and replaced by a series of torrid snapshots of the pair engaged in various gratuitously nasty grapplings. Here, really, lies the problem. Having informed us, both on the front cover and on the back, that - quicker than you can say "wonky wallaby" - it will metamorphose into a feature film directed by Jane Campion and starring Harvey Keitel and Kate Winslet, it's hard to take Holy Smoke seriously as a book at all. In fact, it's hard to dispel the suspicion that the whole thing has been engineered simply to provide Harvey Keitel with an opportunity to whip his clothes off and simulate kinky couplings with a young girl in a weird landscape - a movie, let's face it, we've all seen before.
I never liked The Piano. It always seemed to me - a failed pianist, admittedly, but there you are - to amount to sexual abuse of an innocent instrument. And now, with Holy Smoke, the Campion sisters have done much the same thing to the novel form. Why publish this story as a "novel" at all? Why not just write a screenplay like everybody else? Take it as a novel, and it's one-dimensional, confused, superficial and burdened with an excruciatingly heavy-handed "split narrative" technique which, given the relentless visual nature of the story, is akin to taking a sledgehammer to a nut. But take it as a feature film of the future, and hey - if the notion of Harvey Keitel in a sari is your idea of heaven, Holy Smoke might just provide the path to everlasting enlightenment.
Arminta Wallace
The Dancers Dancing. By Eilis Ni Dhuibhne. Blackstaff. £7.99
This novel follows a group of girls from Dublin and Derry to the Donegal Gaeltacht through the summer of 1972. Their parents believe that the Gaeltacht purifies urban children, makes them independent, and fosters their professional career. Above all, the children will imbibe the mysterious force, "culture". Orla, the central character, is knowing about difference, and wary of idealised belonging. Class divisions have made her self-conscious about her parents, her house, her relations. Thus, Orla is acutely alive to nuances of dialect, accent, grammar and vocabulary. She grasps that language is a matter of relation, perspective, of gaps between the official and the real: a traditional Irish school house is nouns and verbs rearranged, the North is Mars bars and funny words like "Brits".
Contemplating her Irish college, Orla senses that the Irish they are learning is "false"-toned, part of an adopted regime "related to school" and outside of the lived experience of the locals, who speak English away from the scholars' hearing. When a crisis occurs, even Headmaster Joe resorts to English because, from the children's perspective, "Irish is not real life". This novel, like other recent Irish writing, turns west to explore sexual and Irish identities. But rather than being a search for essential origins, Ni Dhuibhne's narrative reveals the contingency of a historical moment. Language and landscape are layered, but they cannot fix what is preserved, only muddy it. As the narrator puts it: "You dig and dig and sometimes you don't recognise what you find."
There is no innocent return. The nightly ceili begins as impossible, "like having to do a Euclid theorem with your legs", but later, in the shifting relationship of mind to body, the dance becomes a pattern which each child can take part in, shaped out of the rhythms of the landscape. The transformation is less to do with cultural redemption than with adolescent passion. For many of the teenagers, the intense landscape is a way of translating their emergent sexuality into an acceptable romantic impulse, almost "programmed by the tourist board".
Orla, too, momentarily encounters a poetic otherworldly romanticism, inevitably of a dark and savage, rather than sentimental, tone. She recognises that a trace of the unspeakable past is part of her personal history, but the fleeting knowledge is a narrative remnant to an ending that repudiates false cohesions. Ni Dhuibhne's writing is marvellous, building layers of impression until a complex, vital and true-false picture of liberation is revealed.
Kathy Cremins