The
Dance Sequence
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A
word about the novels. There are six books in this section.
I |
think
of them as 'The Dance Sequence'. A dance because it was
while |
I
was writing DANCE ON MY GRAVE
that I realised there would be six |
novels.
And because I think of them as an intricate kind of dance
- a |
dance
of stories and of characters, a dance of incidents and ideas |
and
experiences, and fundamental to everything else, a dance
of |
words,
of language. A sequence because they are like members of
a |
family.
Each one is an individual and has its own separate personality, |
standing
on its own feet, so to speak; but each is genetically related |
to
the others. They share much in common while also seeing
the |
world
through their own eyes. |
Together
they paint a portrait of a certain kind of youthful life,
of |
becoming
adult in the last years of the twentieth century and the |
first
of the new millennium. Each is especially concerned with
|
particular
kinds of experience. BREAKTIME,
for example, seems to me |
to
be very preoccupied with physical experience - the life
of the five |
senses.
DANCE ON MY GRAVE is to do
especially with emotions and |
personal
obsessions. NOW I KNOW dwells
on the dramatic clash of |
belief
and rational thought. THE TOLL
BRIDGE is a 'recognition story' |
that
speaks of discovering the friendship of platonic love which
young |
people
often call soul mates. The characters in POSTCARDS
FROM NO |
MAN'S
LAND are constantly crossing boundaries. - Just one
way of |
thinking
about the stories, there are others, but this will do for
a |
start.
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The
family was completed in 2005 with publication of the sixth
book, |
THIS
IS ALL: THE PILLOW BOOK OF CORDELIA KENN. It is called
This |
Is
All not only because it is the final book in the Sequence,
but also |
because
it sums up, adds to, and revises all that has been described |
in
the previous five novels. No wonder it is 816 pages long!
It is also |
the
only book in the Sequence which has a girl as the main character. |
As
epigraphs in the books put it: All writing is drawing. All
writing is |
memory.
All writing is a gift. |
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For
a critical study of all six novels in the Dance Sequence
see: Betty |
Greenway,
Aidan Chambers: Master Literary Choreographer, The |
Scarecrow
Press, 2006, 133pp, ISBN 978-0-8108-5087-3. |
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See
READERS WRITE for an essay by Kate
Smith on 'Meeting and Rescue' in the novels in the Dance
Sequence. |
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Click
this link to go to the Frequently Asked
Questions (FAQs) page. |
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All
contents are ©Aidan Chambers unless otherwise
stated.
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From
Margaret Meek and Victor Watson, Coming of Age in Children's
Literature (Continuum, 2003, p 37-40):
These
[six] metafictive novels provide shifting perspectives upon
young adult anxiety and obsession…shift freely in manner, authorial
perspective, page-design and font. There are sometimes several
narrators, but the dominant voice is always that of a first-person
young narrator - angry and rueful, articulate and witty, full
of quotations and word-play, self-conscious, self-obsessed,
sex-obsessed, explicit and vivid, full of the facetiousness
and stylistic fireworks of intelligent adolescence…
'The young-adult world which Chambers' young protagonists inhabit
is a dramatic, highly-coloured place of uncertain friendships,
violence and cynicism. They are thinkers, exhibitionists, passionate
enquirers and symbol-seekers, pitiless scoffers and vulnerable
egotists. And in these [six] novels there is - more than in
any other young adult fiction - a powerful sense of adolescent
physicality … Furthermore, the writing is preoccupied with meaning,
with words, with the difficulty of accurately communicating
truth …
Writing
of this kind suggests an author articulating his struggle with
the materials of his craft; but it challenges readers too, teasingly
inviting them into an authorial conversation about fiction and
truth… 'Is anything resolved in these novels? Perhaps a more
appropriate question would be: can anything ever be resolved
in a narrative devoted to adolescence? If it is the nature of
maturation that it is always in process and never complete,
maturation narratives must accordingly be fluid, uncertain and
open-ended … Chambers' maturation narratives are inevitably
always unfinished, not just a series of events still unfolding
but a conversation between an impassioned writer and an engaged
reader - what it is like to know everything and to have experienced
nothing. But something is, if not resolved, at least formulated
in these [six] fictions - some conviction or clarity about the
nature of guilt, or heroism, or death, or love.'
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