Connecting to Readers across Time: On Anna Hope’s ‘The Ballroom’
Book Review by Margaryta Golovchenko
Margaryta Golovchenko talks about love and horror in a Great War asylum in Hope’s novel.
Anna Hope
Historical Fiction | 352 pages | 8.21” x 5.63” | Reviewed: Paperback
978–0–7710–3911–9 | Reprint Edition | $24.95 CDN
McClelland & Stewart | Toronto | BUY HERE
Ella knew about being good. Had known it since she was small. Being good was surviving.
(p. 44)
It is a rare treat to come across a novel as multilayered and complex as Anna Hope’s The Ballroom. A striking example of a fictional narrative that is so compelling it makes the reader question whether it could, somehow, be possible, Hope reaffirms literature’s ability to connect to readers across time. The Ballroom crafts a story that feels startlingly relevant today with characters that feel whole and real. It is a book that may feel deceptively slow at first but one that quickly picks up the pace while raising the emotional stakes.
The novel tells the story of events that took place over the course of the year 1911, cycling through three points of view and interweaving the individual narratives of Ella Fay and John Mulligan, two of the patients at Sharston Asylum, and the doctor Charles Fuller. Hope “sandwiches” these events between a prologue and an epilogue that both jump ahead to 1934, adding additional significance to what happens in between. The Ballroom was one of the rare books that made me teary-eyed because of how carefully and successfully Hope uses this structure to make the reader engage with the story, creating one impression in the beginning only to unmask it in the end. There were a lot of reasons for getting emotional, as well as a wide array of reactions that Hope elicited in me, ranging from anger and horror (the most frequent response) to sadness and a kind of melancholy appreciation. The novel didn’t simply tell a story and create a reading experience for me — it made me conscious of my role as a reader, of the way stories make us feel and what they make us feel.
One of the things I enjoyed the most about The Ballroom was the way I was able to construct a graph in my mind to chart the development of each of the characters. Yet it was difficult simply to classify these changes as either “growth” or “deterioration,” simply to say that it was ironic that Ella and John grew despite their toxic environment and conditions as patients, whereas the more privileged and higher-ranking Charles truly deteriorated over the course of the novel.
The secondary character Clemency Church was the perfect example of this. I found her to be the most complex of all the characters despite taking a backseat to Ella and John, and even to Charles; her role, however, cannot be written off as simply the friend of the female protagonist. Toward the end of the novel, Hope puts the reader into the position where it becomes tempting to judge Clem and to think negatively of her, showing her darker side at moments, such as when she demands from Ella:
“You’re going to tell me,” said Clem eventually. “You know that, don’t you? Whatever it is, I have to know.”
(p. 252).
In this moment, Clem appears manipulative and controlling in a way that echoes the kind of poisonous relationship she had with her family before ending up at Sharston. Her transformation was a strong foil to Charles’, and I found it especially striking to see him grow more twisted and repulsive as the story neared its end. There were a few scenes where I couldn’t help but apply a queer reading to Charles’ actions and reactions, making the entire process of his transformation that much more significant and complex. He is initially portrayed as a man who attended lectures that talked of the inferior and the superior man and the need for the latter to populate the world, believing that it was
inevitable that he too would become one of those superior men […] just by sitting close
(p. 47).
His convictions grow much more extreme, misogynistic, and destructive overall, some of which elicited a strong negative response from me, like his belief that
education had taken over Miss Church’s body; even as they spoke it was laying waste to her organs of reproduction and of sense.
(p. 257)
From Ella’s overall growth and a kind of “maturation,” to watching John find it in him to love and resolve his internal emotional conflict, to asking whether Clem has lost or somehow found herself, to Charles’ growing fanaticism, it is difficult to describe truly the characters Hope created because of how real they felt. I wanted to talk about how ridiculous I found the Feeble-Minded Bill with is faulty logic and how much I couldn’t stand Charles for being drawn to it, or how I went from being unsure about John to really rooting for him. I wanted to talk about them the way one would about their close friends, and this was one of the two major strengths of The Ballroom.
The second of these strengths, then, was the fact that The Ballroom is not simply a historical romance; it is much more than that. Not only does Hope make eugenics and mental health a dominant theme, but she also inserts moments that are easier to miss when one is reading that are all the more worthwhile if one stops to unravel them in consideration. These moments ask “bigger questions” and add to literature’s ongoing quest of grappling with what it means to be human. Two of my favorite examples were details, observations that the omniscient third-person narrator makes. The first noted that
Clem’s face was naked in its wanting, peeled raw. Ella didn’t like to look at it; it looked like she felt.
(p. 211)
The second felt more significant because it comes within the last few pages of the novel and, after all the events, really resonated with me as a reader, the way Hope pointed out that John
was old. Somehow, somewhere along the way, he had become old.
(p. 335)
Moments like these made me enjoy the novel that much more, enhancing the reading experience and adding depth to both the characters and the story. There is a lot of unpackaging one can do with The Ballroom, and this is partially due to the heavy research and effort Hope put into the novel, the author’s note at the end providing additional insight into how to approach the work. While Hope stresses the fact that The Ballroom is a novel, it is written with such conviction and a strong tone that it could easily have been real, further emphasizing how the narrative of history is constantly crafted by someone.
The Ballroom feels and reads very humbly. It doesn’t boast about what it intends to do nor show off when it succeeds, and that is what makes it all the more impressive. This isn’t the kind of book one will dive into right away, and for some, the initial pacing might feel slow to the point where giving up sounds tempting. Yet, I truly believe that everything that follows this bump makes The Ballroom worth reading and, above all, contemplating. It gives the novel a distinctiveness that makes it a hidden gem, both exemplifying the power of historical fiction while also breaking out of the genre’s framework.
