(courtesy Allen & Unwin Book Publishers)
Depending on your perspective, old age is a time where you either throw in the towel and admit life is what it is and there’s no changing it, and by extension, you, or you give things a long, hard look and carpe diem the hell out of what remains of your treasured and precious existence on this earth.
Rather happily for those of us who refuse to believe there’s no expiry date way before the very final end point of death on reinventing yourself and shaking up the still waters of life, The Phoenix Ballroom by Ruth Hogan embraces the latter idea and runs with it in gloriously heartwarming fashion.
For such a profound idea, and don’t let those whispery, insubstantial movies-of-the-week fool you – changing your life in any way when they (who are “they” anyway and why do we listen to their hilariously uninformed, unadventurous groupthink?) say it’s done and dusted is a might act of defying inertia – The Phoenix Ballroom tackles them in a richly nuanced and quite lovely way.
So much so that it doesn’t long for you to fall in love with Venetia Hamilton, a newly-minted widow who emerges into the stark light of her life without her husband Hawk by her side, unsure of what her next steps are and how to navigate them even they do not become apparent.
It’s understandable; her long-established world has been upended, and the one person who defined it in very good, if imperfect, ways is gone – so, where to next?
‘Take a deep breath,’ she told him, ‘ and look at me, rather at your feet.’
With some reluctance, Hawk raised his cool blue eyes and Venetia dazzled him with her brightest smile. ‘Shall we dance?’
Fortunately for Venetia, she has lots of money, a huge house just begging to be filled again, and so, when the emotional chaos of her husband’s passing finally abates, she realises she’s been doing life on auto pilot for fifty something years and it’s time she actually started living, purposefully, joyously living again.
Now, before you start thinking “Oh, here’s yet another change-of-life, warm-and-fuzzy tale to convince us life can be wonderful”, you need to accept that Ruth Hogan is not just any writer.
Where others trot out the cliches and tropes of a genre with little dressing and no impactful sense of originality, Hogan takes those pieces and fashions something quite wonderfully different though heart-stirringly recognisable.
As Venetia comes alive in a thousand different ways from adopting a brilliantly bright new wardrobe to reasserting her agency in a life handed across to her husband and then her rather pompous if sweet son, Heron (the family’s members, male and female, are all named after birds such as Hawk’s hilariously out-there but well-meaning sister Nightingale who has a reawakening of her own), The Phoenix Ballroom bursts into a novel that yes, is about a change of life but which refuses to simply have the emotionally gooey without the substance to make it all feel real and substantial.
And while, yes, there is an element of emotional fairytale in any of these books, The Phoenix Ballroom doesn’t pretend that you simply wave a wand, in Venetia’s case an impressively large financial one, and everything simply slots neatly, and newly, into place.
(courtesy official author site)
As Venetia’s recovers her enthusiasm for life, and her love of dancing and those around her springs giddily back into buoyant vivacity, there are a number of obstacles to be negotiated along the way, blockages that will be familiar for anyone who has had to navigate a new passage through their life and wondered why it’s all so damn difficult.
But, and here’s the crucial part, hasn’t given up even in the face of manifest difficulty and sobering circumstance, something Venetia simply refuses to do.
Whether it’s sorting out what her darling endlessly zestful grandson, Kite (yes, it’s a bird, trust us) will do schooling wise or helping her at-first-unwanted live-in helper Liberty to rebuild her life after some ill-judged choices, or even buying the building in which new friend Evangeline runs a spiritualist church and drop-in centre for the local area’s down-and-out (and where Venetia has a substantially meaningful past of her own), the English-set The Phoenix Ballroom is all about defying convention and ignoring the naysayers and going ahead and living your life in your way anyway.
That may sound militant and devil-may-care but it’s not; The Phoenix Ballroom is not about gaining things at the expense of others but about helping them discover and hang onto them, and in so doing, building a warmly inclusive found family which transforms the life of everyone lucky enough to be a member of it.
These are people who, by the way, are described on the book’s back cover blurb as “damaged and lonely people” but thanks to Venetia’s refusing to believe life is done with her, and she with it, they don’t stay that way for long and where they end up is testament to how powerful hope and enthusiasm for a brighter future and living your truth can be.
She [Venetia] pointed up at the ceiling.
‘Those stars are still there under all that muck. And they will shine again. That I can promise you!’
That’s a well-over used phrase but in Hogan’s assured hands, it feels new and thrillingly promising.
There’s such a truth and power to living out who you actually are and doing what you think best, especially in defiance of the small-minded and the naysayers, and The Phoenix Ballroom celebrates it with gusto and emotional vibrancy at every turn, giving each of its characters the chance to discover themselves and to live that truth out in the warm and safe environment of “found family” where thy are endlessly supported and undeniably loved.
It is a great big hug for the soul, no doubt, but The Phoenix Ballroom is far from just being a warm and fluffy moments that passes before you know it.
Yes, you get a much-need shot of enthusiastic adrenaline, an emboldening to seize the day and make the most of every newly-realised moment, and it’s a gloriously enlivening and soul warming as you’d hope it might be, but The Phoenix Ballroom is far more than that, wonderful though that is; it is also a reminder that past mistakes and profound regrets don’t have to be the end of your story, and that second chances, real, muscular actual second chances are not only possible but necessary and that when we get them, like Venetia does, we must do the most we can with them and see where life, in its all wondrous possibilities, takes us.