Olivia Cole on Victoria Hislop’s second novel
Married to a permanently well-lunched Englishman, Sonia Cameron, the half-Spanish heroine of Victoria Hislop’s second novel The Return, seeks escapism — first in a local dance class (to which she becomes unexpectedly addicted) and, more compellingly, in a chapter of her family history by which she becomes distracted whilst in Granada improving her salsa.
If the initial domestic pretext for put-upon 35-year-old Sonia’s ensuing jaunts, complete with a man-hating best friend, feels a little dated (more Shirley Valentine’s Eighties Liverpool than modern loaded-but-lonely SW16), readers of Hislop’s previous novel, The Island, will by now be familiar with her characters’ tendency to flee present-day dissatisfactions into history.
While Easyjet tickets, a girly weekend of dancing inspired by neon studio signs (‘Lern to dance. Dance to live. Live to dance,’) and daydreams of ‘hauntingly gloomy’ Almodovar films could be too touristy a premise for a novel, Hislop carefully choreographs her way from a long-distance fascination with Spain to a novel about domestic experiences in the Civil War. And beyond the kitsch of tourists learning flamenco is a serious critique of Spanish dancing in an account that manages, for all the high feelings, to stay just the right side of sentimentality.
At the centre is Mercedes Ramirez, a young dancer, and her three brothers, warring, before the outbreak of war, not only over politics but, even more dangerously under Franco (who notoriously had the poet Lorca murdered), over sexuality too. Beyond dance as present-day and Thirties risky release, forgetting (or rather remembering) is the impetus of the novel. The plot hinges on the willingness of a stranger, the elderly proprietor of the El Barril café in Granada (formerly the Ramirez family business) to share his story. As Hislop acknowledges in an Afterword, only recently has the pacto de olvido — the resolve to forget rather than investigate — started to shift in Spain. Though she writes to entertain, her depth of research is frequently harrowing.
The Return opens in Granada (site of a long and bloody stalemate in the Civil War) but the action is as dispersed as the characters, through whose chaotic journeys we see the fall of city after city, as women are urged to be ‘the widows of heroes, not the wives of cowards’. The conflict provides a convincing backdrop to Mercedes’ and her gitane accompanist Javier’s love story — and their inability to pay attention to a reality less seductive than their own. But when life’s horrors become impossible to ignore, Mercedes’ experiences begin to give genuine power to the gaudy neon signs pulsing with the promise of dance as a means of survival.