Colum McCann: Dancer

By MARGIE THOMSON

It's difficult to take a non-fictional figure, the dancer Rudolph Nureyev, and make a fiction of him.

The result? An unusual hybrid, difficult for the reader to know where the lines are drawn. The solution? Just relax and enjoy it because it's a marvellous, fascinating story.

Based on the usual kind of research (although he stops short of offering us a bibliography) McCann offers us a truth that is no mere recitation of dates, places and "he dids", but a kaleidoscopic re-enactment of a life, mostly seen through the eyes of others.

And, of course, that's how superstardom operates, having less to do with the actual person than with those who watch, adore (or, as we see in this novel, hate) and need.

For all that, McCann's achievement is that a man does emerge - magnificent, flawed, punishing of himself and others - from the legend, and powerfully insinuates himself into our thoughts and feelings.

Anchored by fact, McCann's Nureyev nevertheless soars above it, defying gravity just as the dancer himself attempted all his life to do.

McCann uses language as a painter might approach a canvas, building up the textures of the physical and social landscapes, merely implying the shape of his true subject, whom we first meet as a six-year-old in 1944, "hungry and narrow and keen".

Perched on a cliff above his home town of Ufa in the frozen reaches of the Soviet Union, Rudik waits for his father to return home from the war. When he arrives, his father tells him to become an engineer or a doctor, and beats him for dancing.

But even then the small boy was causing a sensation, entertaining dying soldiers at the local hospital, who gratefully thrust sugar cubes at him.

The extreme poverty in which he grew up is totally at odds with the untrammelled luxury, the Beluga caviar and champagne, and the extreme, consuming indulgence of the senses which mark out his later life in the West.

After his defection in 1961, the sugar cubes were replaced with women's underwear and flowers, and also by shards of glass, thrown on stage by communists in punishment for his betrayal.

The vicious bullying he received at school in Ufa, and the climate of fear and suspicion in which all Soviet citizens lived under Stalin, shaped his personality - or so McCann would have us believe - until he became someone who was, aggressively, owned by no-one.

His acts of arrogance and cruelty were legion and legendary.

"Perhaps the bullying of Rudik was punishment in advance," his sister muses.

For all its unusual structure, Dancer follows a mostly chronological sequence (it's the perspectives and voices that keep changing) in this made-for-fiction story of the peasant who becomes an international star.

We see his years training (where a fellow student bitterly observes: "You see him feigning no emotion at the bulletin board when he is given the role you always wanted"), We examine his long partnership with Margot Fonteyn, and his 30-year absence from home and family (he misses his mother; when he finally goes back she doesn't recognise him). His physical attainments on both the stage, and in the gay bathhouses of New York are outline, and, finally, we leave him shortly before his death from Aids in 1994.

His brutality, his very success, brought one kind of happiness, but not another.

"I am a non-person where I become a person," Nureyev laments, and quotes Goethe: "Such a price the gods exact for song, to become what we sing."

Somehow, McCann has uncovered the man, or the possible man, inside the legend without damaging the icon.

* Weidenfeld & Nicholson, $35