Lloyd Jones: Here at the end of the world we learn to dance

By MARGEI THOMSON

The sales reps, who get to read new books before anyone else, were reportedly enrolling for tango lessons while still only halfway through Lloyd Jones' latest novel.

If this response proves widespread - and it could well do, for the book fills one with a yearning for the excitement of the dance - then no longer will anyone be able to accuse us of being "passionless people".

According to the book, beating even beneath the lumpy jerseys of West Coast farmers are hearts that fill with awe at the slow sensuousness of this Argentinian music, even when transposed into a landscape where "the bare hills unfold to the horizon" and the native sounds are of sheep and National Radio.

Jones is revealed somewhat surprisingly as a connoisseur of tango (his last book, remember, was Montana Prize-winner The Book of Fame, about the 1905 All Blacks), and the pages of this intense, lovely story repeat the names of the great exponents - Gardel, Troilo, Goyeneche - so that we in turn feel a familiarity, although we may never have heard a note.

(This can be quickly remedied by a visit to www.fortunecity.com/victorian/summit/373/index2.html, where Troilo's Danzarin, the signature tune of Louise, the book's poignant heroine, can be listened to, complete with a preamble from the man himself.

It sounds so light-hearted - a story about dance and love - and yet it is also so ineffably sad, just like the tango itself, heartbreaking and exhilarating. In fact, Jones has solved something that's notoriously difficult: how to write about music so that the words themselves express its character.

It's a sort of cross-language exercise, and he does it obliquely, not trying much to describe the music itself, but rather describing what happens to those it affects, so that we, too, may catch its mood and meaning, its feeling.

Not only does the book follow the form and cadence of tango music - the backward-stepping opening chapters, the movement and breathless pauses of the unfolding story-strands - but the stories themselves reveal the wistfulness of romance, of love without possession, the poignancy of departure, of leaving and being left, that are among this music's central themes.

At the novel's heart, weaving through the decades from 1916 to the 1960s, and then resonating, like a plucked guitar string, into the present day, is the love story of Paul Schmidt and Louise Cunningham.

It's a wonderful, aching tale. They meet when Schmidt (as he is always referred to) visits the West Coast town where Louise lives; he tunes her piano, finishing not with a jaunty rendition of Greensleeves like the last tuner, but with a slow melody Louise can't place. "It is a tango, Louise," Schmidt tells her and, there in her front room, he teaches her to dance.

Jones tells us that one can fall in love in three minutes, if that's how long a tango should happen to last. Whether Louise and Schmidt fall in love that afternoon, or whether it occurs later, in the cave they hide in for several weeks with two local men, all of them dodging either the draft or the anti-German bigotry inspired by World War I, it's a love that will send them on a trajectory of deception, ill-timed departures and arrivals, far away from the rugged West Coast to bustling Buenos Aires.

Picking up the threads of this older history, Schmidt's granddaughter Rosa embodies a story that works in the opposite direction, from Argentina, to Australia, to Wellington. Her life picks up the strands of the ones before it, like a dance pattern that won't be waylaid, of love, rivalry, leaving.

Rosa, a restaurant owner, glamorous at 36, embarks on a kind of affair with the narrator, Lionel, a 19-year-old student/dishwasher with a downy chin and a lot to learn. She reveals to him the story of Schmidt and Louise, and the tango itself, until the two stories begin to overlap.

The son of farmers, Lionel has had his life mapped out for him, having experienced nothing that he wasn't expecting.

"Intimacy was a faraway notion. I had no experience of it, and because of that I recognised there was a line for me to cross - a line that separated private and public, containment and abandonment, secrecy and expression ... Rosa had opened the door to something new."

Thus the story is also about Lionel's growing maturity as he struggles with the adult emotional landscape.

Carrying all the vulnerability, hopefulness and arrogance of his age group, Lionel fails to recognise until almost too late the quiet intimacy that existed in his own childhood home, forged through mutuality and hard work.

Jones isn't disparaging about Kiwi undemonstrativeness. Rather, he insists that passion takes many forms.

"Every change of dance partner brings something new out of you," one character says, and an older, wiser Lionel, looking back, comments: "It didn't occur to me that intimacy, like dancing, can be a variable experience."

This is skilfully constructed book, gracefully traversing huge distances in time and geography, as well as character. It's very rich, but never hard work. It reads lightly, snaring you first in this mood, then that.

There is much longing and sadness, and we almost gasp as we register the long, silent pauses of loneliness that accented the lifelong dance between Louise and Schmidt. Happiness? It's here as well, as momentary pinpricks of joy among the longing.

Certainly, when you finally get to listen to the music that's so much a part of it, it all makes absolute sense.

Penguin

$34.95

* Margie Thomson is the Herald books editor.