"Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance" : The tango as a ticket to a different life

"Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance"

by Lloyd Jones

Dial Press, 276 pp., $12

I first came across New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones in 1994, when his book "Biografi: A Traveller's Tale" was published here. In its pages, Jones tries to track down a possibly fictional dentist said to be the decoy-double of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha (1908-85). Already Jones' focus was, in part, on the link between real existence and shadow existence.

Then, last year, Jones found a wide audience with his novel "Mister Pip," a Man Booker Prize finalist and winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. That book, set on the war-torn island of Bougainville when it was trying to secede from Papua New Guinea in the 1990s, was narrated by a young schoolgirl who finds escape from the tension and violence around her in the pages of Charles Dickens' "Great Expecations." She and her schoolmates, she says, are "trying to get ourselves another life," with Dickens' hero Pip as their guide. Jones shrewdly analyzed the gains and losses involved when you imagine yourself from one kind of existence into another.

Thanks to the success of "Mister Pip," Dial Press is bringing out Jones' 2001 novel, "Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance," previously unpublished in the U.S. Again the focus is on imagining a life beyond your own — only the ticket to that life, in this case, is the tango.

"Here at the End of the World" is split in its setting (New Zealand, Buenos Aires, Sydney) and more complicated in time scheme than "Mister Pip," spanning three generations. It sparks interest on its second page with a disclosure about one of its Buenos Aires-based characters: "For someone with a huge deception at the center of his life, Schmidt prided himself on cultivating many small loyalties."

But Paul Schmidt, an English music-store entrepreneur of German extract, is just one enigmatic figure in the plot. His granddaughter Rosa, who decades later runs a restaurant in Wellington, N.Z., is even more of a riddle — certainly when viewed through the eyes of her employee, 19-year-old student-dishwasher Lionel, who becomes her lover.

Never mind that she's 17 years his senior, and married. With her tango lessons and her worldly ways, she opens horizons well beyond the sexual for him. Once he gets a glimpse of what she's offering, the idea of going back to the family farm where he grew up induces total panic in him. Only Rosa, with her stories of her family's past and her recordings of Buenos Aires café classics, can give him the breathing space he needs.

Like "Mister Pip," "Here at the End of the World" becomes a tale about finding your place in the world through someone else's storytelling. And Rosa's stories — about her grandfather becoming a victim of World War I anti-German hysteria while working as a traveling piano tuner in rural New Zealand, and about New Zealand country girl Louise Cunningham following him back to Buenos Aires after the war — are all shaped by the sensual thrust of Argentine dance steps and bandoleon music.

Not everything in the book works. Least convincing is an early flashback about Schmidt, Louise and two conscientious objectors surviving for weeks in a cave while hiding from xenophobic New Zealand yokels.

But when the book zeros in on Lionel's crush on Rosa and his hunger for the tales she has to tell, Jones hits one perfect note after another. Farm life can't help but look monochrome when compared with the kaleidoscope Rosa is offering: "Rosa once said that every change of dance partners brings something new out of you. A new way of being, a new way of moving. An entirely new compass is put in place."

Lionel's ultimate choices about his life hang unresolved until the book's very end.

There are other Jones novels we're still missing here. Several — "Swimming to Australia," "This House Has Three Walls," "Paint Your Wife" — rouse your curiosity by their titles alone. Let's hope Dial sees fit to bring more our way.

He has been the Seattle Times book critic since

1998 and has published

four novels.