Dancing on Knives

LoveReading Says

What an absolutely beautiful novel. Arresting and lyrical, and exuding folkloric power, Joanne Rush’s Dancing on Knives explores the dark, long-lingering legacies of war through a young Bosnian refugee who confronts the ghosts of her past when her husband’s work takes them to Serbia.

Bosnian refugee Laura is working as an assistant librarian in a Cambridge University library when she first encounters Ivan Tabak, a Bosnian poet whose work speaks of Bosnian water spirits — vilas. At the same time, she meets Adam, a British diplomat whom she falls in love with and marries, and whose work searching for war criminal Ratko Mladic sees them move to Serbia, the country that invaded her own.

With Adam frequently working away, often out of contact and always unable to speak of his work, Laura is alone with her thoughts. “What does it mean to carry trauma?” she wonders. “Trauma is a heavy part of your own self. It’s the weight you bear after an unbearable event".

In this context, Laura interacts with ghosts that appear in her flat. Aware they’re not real, she cooks and eats with them. She talks to them: “Soon it felt like I was running a guest house, or ghost house: a bed and breakfast for Bosnian spooks”.

In time, though much of her life falls away, Laura comes to a sense of homecoming and rebuilds herself in a most wondrous way. As Rush states in her Author’s Notes, “the legacy of conflict is for life. My book acknowledges that. But it also explores how a community might be rebuilt…Stories cannot undo the past, but they may bring hope”. Dancing on Knives does an utterly brilliant job of revealing the painful, complex aftermath of conflict — and hope — with a beautiful denouement and ever-present sense of the water spirits, and their links to migrant water birds that always come home.

Joanne Owen

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