The Sigla Blog

When Sophie Dahl’s novella The Man With the Dancing Eyes was published, an unspoken sub-title lurked in invisible brackets (”an adult fairy tale”). Although Dahl, grand-daughter of children’s author Roald, has graduated to the novel, many aspects of the fairy tale filter into Playing With The Grown-ups. Populated with exotic characters, an entire family of “beauties” and mysticism aplenty, it ticks many boxes of the genre - except that much of this fiction is based on Dahl’s life. Kitty, the teenage protagonist is the eldest daughter of “silver-eyed beauty” Marina, painter and mother to twins Sam and Violet. They have different fathers, and Kitty’s - a distant figure she’s never met called Mr. Fitzgerald - is straight out of a Jane Austen novel. When the novel begins, Marina and the children are living at Hay House with their Scandinavian grandparents, Bestepapa and Bestemama. Dahl conjures up a sprawling, gorgeous house populated with the kind of trinkets usually found in Avoca hand-weavers, while Marina and her children wander about in floaty dresses looking elphin and gorgeous. And does anyone iron their sheets with rosewater?

But even bohemians holed up in a pastoral idyll get itchy feet, so Marina, on the advice of her religious guru Swami-ji, takes the twins and heads for New York. Kitty, already fighting a losing battle for her mother’s attention, is packed off to boarding school, which she had imagined as “Mallory Towers… peppered with a bit of Grease” to talk about food and boys.

No sooner has this inexplicably curt section of the book begun, than it ends with Kitty being summoned to New York by Swam-ji. Reunited with her mother and siblings, they begin a collective quest to be enlightened. Or her mother meditates, while forking out vast sums of money to her guru who smiles beatifically and assures her that “God will provide for you” when the funds start running low. Once again the reader has only just found their bearings in this new location, before Dahl hauls her characters back to London life. This chop/change characteristic of the narrative grates from early on, as this globe-trotting adds nothing to a story, whose cogs are already grinding very slowly.

This slice of Bohemia mirrors Dahl’s upbringing and Marina is a portrait of her own whimsical, beautiful mother Tessa. As a matriarch Marina is consistent only in her love for her children, and this consistency doesn’t extend to the normal routines and structures of raising a family. She is a dainty, fey hybrid of Edina from Absolutely Fabulous as the family check into hotels merely because of a hankering for room service and still fly first class when penniless. Dahl’s own peripatetic childhood involved living in various homes on both sides of the Atlantic, attending 10 different schools and a spell - like Kitty - in an ashram. Her mother’s nomadic life also involved two marriages, drug addiction and a suicide attempt. The latter is replicated in the book, an event that reunites Kitty, Sam and Violet in adult life. En route to visit a stricken Marina and a family regrouping, a pregnant Kitty reflects on her idealistic childhood while imagining what lies before her as parent. Dahl wrong-foots things here, by focusing on the enchanted childhood while completely ignoring a much interesting repercussive narrative that’s been buried. This rose-tinted view dominates the book, and for all Marina’s childishness and irresponsibility, she is never admonished by her family, even in adulthood. More of a big sister than a mother, Kitty, in her quest for love, only encourages her mother’s self-absorption (”Mummy, tell me about when you met Andy Warhol”). Kitty’s grandparents and Hay House represented the stability denied the children, and this is something Dahl steers clear of trying to figure out.

Where Dahl is convincing, is in her portrayal of a confused teenager, and this is a straightforward coming of age tale, albeit one that isn’t most people’s experience. Dahl blurs the lines between fact and fiction, but the authenticity is often compromised by a zeal for sounding like Nancy Mitford, something which overshadows her authorial voice. When her descriptive ability occasionally peeks through, we see what she is capable of. At boarding school, one girl’s underwear stained with her first period is “a scarlet announcement in the basket amongst their childish whites”. Too often though, the story drips with brands and names, mixing up modern references while trying to sound like Edith Wharton. Dahl might not have inherited her grandfather’s way with a story, but Playing With the Grown-Ups shows potential, if she can find her own voice.

Playing With The Grown-Ups is published by Bloomsbury.

This review originally appeared in the Sunday Business Post on January 6th 2008.