Book: Diana Evans -
"The Wonder" - A Notting Hill novel
The plot of Diana Evans’s first novel, 26a, had its roots in her north London childhood and the suicide of her twin sister.Her second, The Wonder, draws on another aspect of Evans’s experience. Before she turned to writing she was a dancer, and at the heart of The Wonder is The Midnight Ballet, an imaginary black dance company founded by a brilliant, troubled Jamaican dancer, Antoney Matheus, wrote the Telegraph book review.
Diana Evans was born in London and spent part of her childhood in Lagos, Nigeria. She studied Media Studies at the University of Sussex and was a dancer in the Brighton-based troupe Mashango before becoming a journalist and author.
The Wonder is not a new Novel, it is published in September 2009 and since August it is available in paperback.
Vintage books wrote about the novel: It’s carnival time! Diana Evans’s second novel The Wonder takes the reader on a dance through Notting Hill past and present.
We see Antoney Matheus and his mother arriving from Jamaica in 1958 to stay in a dim room on the corner of Portobello and Faraday Road; we watch Antoney take his first steps as a dancer to Baba Brooks, the Mighty Sparrow and James Brown in a house on Tavistock Crescent where the Marshall Brothers, from Trinidad, put on a regular Blues party; we see Antoney’s son Lucas wandering a prettified Portobello Road in the nineties trying to piece together his lost father’s life. Check out the sixties Carnival scene on p. 106: ‘There were all kinds of folks about. Whistle-blowing teenagers, spacy Mediterranean students in stripy tops, big-haired Jamaican girls in mini-dresses, old black men slurping pints outside the pubs, shopkeepers, policemen, open-shirted steel band skivers, a well-known barmaid in her famous leopard-print coat. There were fragments in this district of the Sahara Desert and the Irish Sea, the Panama Canal and the music box of Kingston, and the happy and terrible commotion that had developed from this was that you could find a good party as easily as you could a good fight.’
Official website www.dianaommoevans.com
Diane Evans has a sense of the extraordinary
In a Notting Hill café, Diana Evans is reminiscing about the area she used to live in and loved so much. 'Even as a kid I'd love looking at all the beautiful white houses and gardens,' she says.
'I used to adore Carnival, too. But living in Notting Hill was like being on a magazine set: you couldn't leave your flat in trackie bottoms. It's lovely walking down Portobello Road again but it's a tourist trap now.'
Evans's first novel was 26a, a beguiling debut about mixed-race twins growing up in Neasden that walked off with the inaugural Orange Award For New Writers.
Steeped in a magic lyricism that felt entirely unforced, it was strongly informed by half-Nigerian Evans's own experience of losing her twin to suicidal depression.
Evans conceived the novel as a monument to her sister but found the process of writing and promoting it harrowing
'By the end of 26a, I was so tired of talking about my twin that I was determined with my next book to get as far from that as possible,' she says.
'I wanted to write about a man living in a different time who was completely made up. And I wanted to convince myself I could actually write a real novel.'
Set in Ladbroke Grove in the 1960s and 1990s, The Wonder isn't entirely alien to Evans's own experience: it's partly inspired by her love for the magical world of the dance troupe (she worked as a dancer during her twenties) and, in structure and tone, draws deliriously on the sensual, free-form poetry of ballet.
When you're dancing, you're in an extreme childlike state,
and many who gravitate towards dance do so because
they can't deal with ordinariness.
And while it eloquently maps the demographic shifts that have turned Notting Hill from a Caribbean cultural hotbed to chichi boutique central, it was specifically prompted by the real-life story of Les Ballet Negres, an influential, short-lived Jamaican dance troupe established in 1946.
Like 26a, it is also infused with a sense of absence as Lucas, a pot-smoking drifter tries to find out what happened to his father Antoney, a mercurial, emotionally unstable dancer who comes to London in the 1960s, sets up a dance troupe, then disappears.
'I'm fascinated by the relationship between dancers and mental illness,' says the petite Evans, sipping carrot juice.
'Alvin Ailey was bipolar; Lucia Joyce was in institutions throughout her life; Nijinsky was diagnosed with schizophrenia. When you're dancing, you're in an extreme childlike state, and many who gravitate towards dance do so because they can't deal with ordinariness. But I'm also interested in loss and disappearance, and the impact on those left behind.'
Evans attributes her career as a writer to her sister's death. 'When she died, something in me was born,' she says.
'I was aware that time was very important. I even used to think she had inhabited me, although I don't now.' Now living in Sydenham, south-east London, with her partner and young daughter, she has inevitably been lumped together with other 'immigrant' writers, notably Zadie Smith and Monica Ali, which she finds more amusing than offensive. Yet while she writes about race, she doesn't like being overly defined by it.
'Actually, I was worried that The Wonder reinforced the cliché of black absent fathers,' she says.
'But there's so much mythologising of black people, and men in particular, that it's just something black writers have to deal with. There's a lot of vulnerability beneath the swagger of many black men and that's what Lucas is about, really. He's one of the guys you see hanging around Ladbroke Grove who've made the place what it is but know they're being pushed out by capitalism, by New Labour. But on the other hand you can get too het up about race. I prefer just to write about people.'
The Wonder (Chatto & Windus) is out on August 20, priced £12.99.
Read more: http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/718655-diane-evans-has-a-sense-of-the-extraordinary#ixzz17IRUAnDB
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