{"id":474,"date":"2016-09-15T13:38:25","date_gmt":"2016-09-15T13:38:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/?p=474"},"modified":"2016-09-15T13:42:42","modified_gmt":"2016-09-15T13:42:42","slug":"fascinatin-rhythm-dancing-with-joanne-harris-the-lollipop-shoes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/2016\/09\/15\/fascinatin-rhythm-dancing-with-joanne-harris-the-lollipop-shoes\/","title":{"rendered":"Fascinatin\u2019 Rhythm: dancing with Joanne Harris\u2019 ‘The Lollipop Shoes’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some books call to you from a shelf; that silent yet persuasive voice that gets inside your head and tells you that you want, nay, need<\/em>, to read them. Right now.<\/p>\n

\"lollipop_shoes\"This happens to me quite often \u2013 as a compulsive book-buyer, this voice doesn\u2019t need to shout any more, it just nudges me in the right direction and knows that I\u2019ll comply, rolling its eyes (mixed metaphor, but you know what I mean) at the inevitability of it all \u2013 but not quite so compulsively as with Joanne Harris<\/a>\u2019 The Lollipop Shoes<\/em>. I\u2019m late to the Joanne Harris party; the book came out in 2007, and follows Chocolat<\/em>, written in 2001 (which I hadn\u2019t read either), so I have some catching up to do. The siren-call of The Lollipop Shoes<\/em> isn\u2019t hard to fathom \u2013 a heady blend of the front cover’s design, the heft of the book in the hand, the feel of the pages \u2013 and I succumbed instantly.<\/p>\n

What beguiled me about the book from fairly early on was the rise and fall of the rhythm of the prose, the cadences, the dance between duple and triple metre \u2013 as a musician, it\u2019s hard not to notice this aspect of any sound that reaches the ear \u2013 but this was the first time it had been so striking. It wasn\u2019t just telling a story; the words were more akin to a kind of invocation, entirely appropriate for a story concerning the power of spells, of magic.<\/p>\n

\u2018Death grins out from the woodcut design; jealous, joyless, hollow-eyed, hungry \u2013 Death the insatiable; Death the implacable; Death the debt we owe to the gods.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s not just the sound of the words operating here \u2013 assonance, alliteration \u2013 it\u2019s the way they are struck, too; the triplet-metre feel that moves to a duple-metre feel at the same time as the alliterative passage \u2018jealous, joyless.\u2019 The metric change imparts, quite deliberately, a more leaden tread to the manner in which the passages steps, in contrast to the 6\/8 metre that surrounds it.<\/p>\n

‘So many lives just there for the taking; there for the tasting, for someone like me.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Again, it\u2019s that mixture of sound and rhythm, the subtle shift from \u2018taking\u2019 to \u2018tasting\u2019 and the rhythm of the sentence that has me hearing it sung in haunting tones by someone like folk-singer, Mary Hampton. Whole passages seem to pass by in a stately dance; it\u2019s impossible not to be hypnotised. Joanne\u2019s prose does this a lot \u2013 in fact, it was difficult to read the whole of chapter Four without hearing the prose\u2019s inner music and rhythm pulling the ear.<\/p>\n

And that, perhaps, is what the book is all about; not just telling the reader about the power of magic, but actually working its own enchantment, too. With this novel, it\u2019s not only\u00a0about where the story takes you \u2013 it\u2019s about the how, the way in which it does so, too. The excitement about contemporary music is very similar; not just ending up in a new landscape, but being taken there in an unexpected fashion, with new encounters along the way. Joanne\u2019s book has this same appeal; sometimes dancing with the Puckish feel of a Tippett string quartet, elsewhen stepping with the poise of a stately gavotte.<\/p>\n