Dancing With Chairs in the Music House
Ten-year-old Vanessa, the narrator of this novel, is moving to the Music House with her family, as they have been evicted from their previous home. Their new tiny, inconvenient space is part of a Victorian mansion in Toronto, converted into a rooming house. The year is 1949, and Vanessa’s father is still suffering from war injuries. Her mother takes occasional child-minding jobs. The focus of the family is Vanessa’s older brother Jonathon, who they believe has the potential to become a concert pianist.
Their landlady, Miss Rona Layne, teaches piano to Jonathan and a select few students who she thinks have the potential to become great. Her tenants are a miscellaneous bunch of misfits who are fascinating to Vanessa. She finds a way to climb up to the roof and peek into their rooms; intriguing to her, but she knows it would be scandalous to her ultra-respectable mother. Inevitably Vanessa, an intelligent but sheltered child, sees and hears things she does not understand, and she is drawn willingly or unwillingly into other people’s schemes.
The novel starts with the ordinariness of a family being evicted and moves slowly, deliberately to a dramatic conclusion. The domestic minutiae are detailed through a child’s eyes, as are the speech and actions of the adults in the house. This amount of detail can be distracting, but it helps to conceal the essential thin-ness of the plot. The child Vanessa witnesses dramatic events before the climax, unaware of the meaning or implications of what she has seen. It left this reader feeling like a voyeur of something sleazy rather than being carried away by dramatic impact.
