“Violet Hetherington is on a voyage across the Atlantic to meet Edwin, her estranged friend from the distant past. As she journeys across the sea she is carried back to the time when she and Edwin lived together as aspiring poets, until Edwin’s oldest friend arrived on the scene, bringing discord and havoc, and for Violet a betrayal of her ideals and a flight into safety.”
I’m all for writer’s using their experiences as starting points for a novel but although I enjoyed Dancing Backwards, I couldn’t shake the feeling of this story arising from the pages of a travel diary maintained by the author. I might be wrong but I felt that a lot of Violet’s observations were originally the author’s on perhaps a similar voyage across the Atlantic. This might seem mean-spirited on my part but there were several incidents that kept reminding me, such as this one:
“A summary of the dining regime had been including in the information sent in advance of the voyage. Vi was in the Alexandria Grill, one of the upper echelons of the ship’s hierarchical dining system. The ‘dress code for tonight in the Alexandria’, she read, was ‘casual elegant’, whatever that meant. She put on a sleeveless linen shift and a plain black jacket. Too bad if it was not sufficiently elegant, or casual.”
But perhaps I wouldn’t have been focussing on these scenes as much if the other storyline - in the past involving Violet’s life married life in England before the death of her husband and even earlier, meeting Edwin and then later his friend, Bruno - hadn’t struck me as slight.
Vickers is clever at keeping the mystery of Edwin and Bruno unresolved till the last and I must admit that I found the novel strangely healing despite the above reservations. It is soothing to embark on a much anticipated journey with a pleasant character who obviously deserves the holiday and the chance to put her life in perspective.

On a bench