Various Positions

“Dance me to the end of love …” Leonard Cohen sang on the opening track on his 1984 album, Various Positions. Now fellow Canadian Martha Schabas has written a novel with the same name, in which it's not the end of love that dance brings, but the start of a painful coming-of-age. Set in a ballet school for teenagers, her book is more Black Swan than Ballet Shoes, brooding, intense, and readable enough to finish in one sitting.

At the start of the book, narrator Georgia Slade is a shy 14-year-old who loves ballet but seems lost amongst her peers. Anxious about her unhappy home life, she sees herself as “chronically uncomfortable”, hates parties and has no interest in her male classmates. Georgia's life changes when she is accepted to a ballet academy, where her talents draw the attention of a charismatic male dance teacher. A combination of his manipulations, escalating tension at home and Georgia's nascent sexuality builds to a shattering conclusion.

If the plot sounds dramatic, well, it is. The theatrics of ballet and the emotional excesses of adolescence make for a forceful combination, and the story covers ground typical of 'issues'-based YA writing: eating disorders, broken families, and sex. But the melodrama here fits, capturing something authentic about what it is to be a teenager: to have adult desires and fears, but no experience with which to temper them.

And unlike other titles with teenaged protagonists (ahem, Twilight) the book is finely written, full of lyrical, expressive language. It could be tempting to fill a book about ballet with “swan-like necks” and the like, but Schabas keeps it real with evocative descriptions, from the whiff of old beer and Pantene Pro-V in a student share house to the “eerie, deserted look of child abduction” that Georgia's old swing set in the garden takes on: an omen of the reckless jump towards adulthood that she is about to make.

And her behaviour does become reckless. In the first half of the book she has a childlike disinterest in anything to do with sex, but is precociously self-disciplined and perceptive. In the second part of the book, though, she begins to discover sexuality, makes some major errors in judgement and becomes dangerously disinhibited. All it seems to take to bring about her transformation is a smattering of male attention and a few risque Google searches. You feel for Georgia, but the rapidity with which she changes is distracting and undermines some of the psychological realism of the book.

Nevertheless, the book does offer genuine food for thought about sexual politics. Georgia comes from a privileged and well-educated background but still struggles to integrate her sexuality with the rest of her identity. Perhaps it's no wonder, when her world is peopled with brittle female figures and callous, selfish men. Schabas is also at pains to point out that the patriarchal values of ballet and popular culture play a role in the confusing messages about sex that surround Georgia, from ballet's oppressive view of female beauty to women's objectification in The Hills. This isn't just about teen ballerinas, Schabas seems to be saying, this is a story for every girl in our times. It's a thought-provoking point, and one that lends further substance to a very satisfying book.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Various Positions
By Martha Schabas
Published by Text
372 pages
RRP $29.95