A review by nicktomjoe
Dance on My Grave by Aidan Chambers
4.0
In telling this tragic love story of Hal and Barry, Aidan Chambers creates a set of documents - newspaper cuttings, social services reports and sixteen year old Hal’s anguished diary - and a very strange novella - for the reader to negotiate. The result is feverish, painful and amazing. Barry’s sudden Leader-of-the-Pack death - not a spoiler, but key to the plot from the start- is the main point at which Hal is forced to confront some very adult ideas about desire, love and possession. Hal manages it very badly, and his life disintegrates, caught between his parents’ misunderstandings and hostility and the mirror on his emotions he confronts in Kari, the ambivalent third member of Hal and Barry’s brief time together.
A moving story in a number of different registers, Chambers has the voices just right: the cool, puzzled court reports, the frenetic and overwrought diaries with their ramblings and their just-short-of-explicit sexuality. Not an easy read, but one in which Chambers has control of a powerful, emotional plot in which surviving bereavement is shown as a raw and difficult process.
A moving story in a number of different registers, Chambers has the voices just right: the cool, puzzled court reports, the frenetic and overwrought diaries with their ramblings and their just-short-of-explicit sexuality. Not an easy read, but one in which Chambers has control of a powerful, emotional plot in which surviving bereavement is shown as a raw and difficult process.