{"id":7628,"date":"2021-08-02T14:59:18","date_gmt":"2021-08-02T14:59:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?page_id=7628"},"modified":"2021-08-02T15:10:04","modified_gmt":"2021-08-02T15:10:04","slug":"the-turnout","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/?page_id=7628","title":{"rendered":"The Turnout"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Megan Abbott, The Turnout<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Review by Lee Horsley<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Megan Abbott\u2019s The Turnout <\/em>is a mesmerising novel, wonderfully written and vividly imagined. At once brutal and delicate, it takes place in the world of a decaying, secret-laden ballet school. Some of Abbott\u2019s most remarkable earlier crime novels have also explored, to stunning effect, the obsessive, competitive lives of teenage girls who commit themselves to intensely demanding physical disciplines \u2013 the cheerleaders of Dare Me<\/em>, the gymnasts of You Will Know Me. <\/em>The ballet performances at the heart of The Turnout <\/em>require an even more extraordinary level of dedication, offering success only to those select few capable of giving themselves over completely to its punishing and traumatising discipline.     <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The novel\u2019s title refers to a freakishly difficult dancer\u2019s skill \u2013 one that acquires considerable imagistic significance. Achieving turnout is \u201ca rite of passage\u201d, an unnatural and extremely painful accomplishment that enables dancers to rotate their legs from their hip sockets. The founder of the school loved to tell her daughters how, at the age of ten, she had mastered turnout under the tutelage of a Great Diva:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSuddenly, something snapped inside and her hips and legs felt infinitely pliable, soft taffy, a slinky expanding. Her hips, hot and newly supple, opened like a book from the center of her body. It felt glorious and so painful she saw stars. But she did not stop. Why would she? That feeling, that sensation hot in the center of her\u2026 It was, she told them, the greatest feeling of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ecstatic torturing of one\u2019s own body is one of The Turnout\u2018s<\/em> defining themes. Again and again, the barely pubescent dancers experience this merging of agony and pleasure.  Longing to ascend to the highest degree of perfection, they force their bodies into unnatural shapes, enduring torment to achieve ballet\u2019s illusion of effortless, ethereal beauty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The nurturing of such perfection has long been the mission of the Durant School of Dance, which has been in the family since the mid-1980s. Since the death of their mother, who created it, the sisters Dara and Marie, together with Dara\u2019s husband Charlie, have presided over all aspects of the school. The three have lived together in the same house since their early teens, when Charlie was taken in by their mother and became part of their household \u2013 a boy of great beauty and talent, who at the beginning was a dancer himself, but now suffers from a back ruined by years of ballet injuries. It is a claustrophobic gothic fantasy saturated with both pain and sensuality. The entwining of the three of them is at the heart of the novel: \u201cBack then, it seemed impossible to be any closer. The three of them, so entwined. Charlie was Dara\u2019s husband, but he was also so much more. Dara, Marie, and Charlie, their days spent together at the studio, their nights in their childhood home. Back then.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their childhood home, their dance studio and their intense private world are all put under threat when fire ravages a part of the already run-down studio and their lives are invaded by Derek, a larger-than-life contractor who assures them he will put right the damage. He also, however, aims at far more, as his familiarity with family members becomes increasingly charged with seductiveness and menace: \u201cThis monster, this Big Bad Wolf, this bloodsucker who never should have been let in, this stranger who never belonged\u2026\u201d To Dara, he seems to become larger by the day, swinging his long hammer and flashing his preternaturally white smile \u2013 \u201csmiling with hundreds of teeth\u201d as his manly boots track mud on the steps of the ballet school: \u201cmud tracks, his signature tattoo, his imprint all over the studio every day\u2026a man who goes as he pleases, who knows no boundaries, who leaves messes in his wake.\u201d Like so much in The Turnout<\/em>, the swaggering Derek carries with him echoes of the darkest fairy stories, wielding power not only in his apparently never-ending changes to the building but in his assault on the very fabric of the family group. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The whole of Abbott\u2019s narrative is mapped on to the dreamlike world of the school\u2019s annual production of The Nutcracker<\/em>, \u201ca young girl\u2019s dream of peering over the precipice into the dark furrow of adulthood and finding untold pleasures.\u201d The frightening but mysteriously compelling contractor is echoed by the figure of the Nutcracker \u2013 its huge papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 head faded by time but its \u201cbared-teeth grin\u201d looming as large as ever, presiding over \u201ca dream of hunger, of appetite\u201d that was, like all fairy tales, \u201cmuch darker, stranger than you guessed.\u201d The version of the story read to Dara and Marie by their mother was E.T.A. Hoffmann\u2019s Nutcracker and Mouse\u2011King<\/em>, illustrated by \u201cgaudy, frightening images\u201d that underscored the darkness of the story \u2013 \u201ca warning for those who become lost to desire.\u201d Abbott\u2019s hypnotic, beautifully modulated style carries her readers into an erotic noir fable, in which human fragility is at every point threatened by the deceits, dark desires and murderous impulses that are never as far from the radiant surface as we imagine them to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Megan Abbott will deliver the 2021 Noirwich Crime Writing Festival Lecture<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Megan Abbott, The Turnout Review by Lee Horsley Megan Abbott\u2019s The Turnout is a mesmerising novel, wonderfully written and vividly imagined. At once<\/p>\n

Continue readingThe Turnout<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":779,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7628"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/779"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7628"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7635,"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7628\/revisions\/7635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crimeculture.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}