Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro: book review

Dance of the Happy Shades and Other Stories (1968) is a collection of 15 stories set in Ontario, Canada, from the 1930s to the 1950s.

This is a wonderful collection of stories, some connected and others discrete, of autobiographical and semi-autobiographical accounts of rural life in Canada. These are about ordinary lives told in an extraordinary way, with honesty, ambiguity, loneliness, disconnectedness, and intrigue. Most of the stories are from the young voice of children, others from women, and others from men.

There are affairs, deaths, accidents, guilt, beginnings of love and romance, and school days. Every story is beautifully told, slowly revealed, and poignantly depicted. They are funny, sad, true, bold, and a little intimidating.

There are short sentences, and enormously long sentences. And sentences like, ‘Oh Buddy Shields, you can just go on talking, and Clare will tell jokes, and Momma will cry, till she gets over it, but what I’ll never understand is why, right now, seeing Clare McQuarrie as an unexplaining man, I felt for the first time that I wanted to reach out my hands and touch him.’

I liked all of the stories, although if I had to choose three of my favourites, I would choose two intensely personal autobiographical ones – ‘The Office’ and ‘Red Dress – 1946’ – and the first story, ‘Walker Brothers Cowboy’ in which a young girl realizes her salesman father has been seeing another woman.

MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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