Inter-review with Fiona Snyckers, author of The school gates – light with a bite

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The school gates
Fiona Snyckers
Modjaji Books
ISBN: 978-1-928433-19-4

Fiona Snyckers is arguably one of South Africa’s most prolific authors. Her novels range from young adult stories, such as the delightful Trinity series, to mysteries and light fiction with an edge, such as The school gates. Then there is her very serious fiction, such as Lacuna*, which gives an alternative point of view from the raped victim of JM Coetzee’s Disgrace. Her work deals with a broad spectrum of subject matter, yet even the apparently light-weight fiction has a serious bite to it.

The school gates is a single protagonist novel (what a relief for my tired brain it was to follow just one character’s story, for a change!) which focuses on Ella Burchell, a professional ballerina who has decided to take some time out from the demanding world of professional dancing as a prima ballerina to regain her health. She chooses an apparently peaceful seaside town on the North Coast of KZN to regain her sense of self. It soon becomes obvious that Ella has a serious eating disorder. She developed this to maintain her slimness for her career under the regime of her mentor and former lover, Peter, whose main aim was to keep Ella as skinny as possible, as all ballet dancers are meant to be. Ella is driven to escape to Pineapple Beach after she almost collapses on stage during a performance due to extremely low blood sugar.

In the novel, Snyckers describes Ella’s battles with food unflinchingly and details how early menopause sets in with serious anorexia. Ella is in a chronic stage of the eating disorder and, at Pineapple Beach, goes under the care of Dr Ngcobo, her childhood doctor, who tries to get her healthy again.

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Ella’s personal struggle to come to terms with looking after herself for the sake of her health rather than her profession coalesces with the ambitions of a group of proverbial “Ballet Moms”, who discover Ella teaching ballet to three young girls in a park. These girls are dancing in the park, as they were apparently “not suitable” for the school ballet class.

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Ella’s personal struggle to come to terms with looking after herself for the sake of her health rather than her profession coalesces with the ambitions of a group of proverbial “Ballet Moms”, who discover Ella teaching ballet to three young girls in a park. These girls are dancing in the park, as they were apparently “not suitable” for the school ballet class. According to them, they had to audition for school classes but failed, as they are not the proverbial skinny blonde girls that they are told ballet dancers have to be. A group of ambitious mothers, who epitomise the phrase tiger moms, see Ella teaching the girls for fun in the park and learn of her origins as an international prima ballerina. It becomes their most urgent desire to have Ella teach their children at the local private school, the Pines.

The school is virtually under the command of the richest and most powerful of the uber-moms, Heather Renwick. Heather Renwick’s only claim to success is that she married a very successful and rich man. However, she uses this power to lord it over the other moms and the workings of the very elite private school their children go to, through her role on the governing body and as supplier of enormous funds for special favours from the teachers and principal. The Monster Moms ensure that every teacher does as they decree. Their competitive drive to push their children to fulfil their own unfulfilled dreams threatens to destroy their children’s health and well-being. Ella finds herself snapped up to become the star teacher at the Pines, deposing an older woman whom she is told is ready for retirement. Ella tries to include the outsider girls in her class, but faces opposition from the Monster Moms every step of the way. Her only ally seems to be a part-time coach, Ashton, but he is often too unavailable for her to rely on him completely.

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Snyckers has written another page-turning novel which has depth of subject matter and accuracy of its portrayal of the fierce battles for position on the part of the mothers (and fathers) of pupils at private schools.

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Snyckers has written another page-turning novel which has depth of subject matter and accuracy of its portrayal of the fierce battles for position on the part of the mothers (and fathers) of pupils at private schools. I read somewhere that Snyckers was accused of drawing on stereotypes for the characters of the Monster Moms. I’d like to disagree. Monster Moms are real. I met many in my unhappy years as a ballet mom and as a school mom. I never fitted in because I just wanted my daughter to have fun in her dancing classes, where other moms had agendas I’d never dreamed of. Snyckers’s eye for detail ensures that the characters in her novels ooze with authenticity, and her broad scope gives the story relevance in a changing South Africa, where, unfortunately, it seems only money and power are the currencies that count in the end.

It’s a great read and I recommend it highly.

Q and A between Janet van Eeden and Fiona Snyckers:

Fiona, your protagonist in this story is Ella Burchell, a professional ballerina who has decided to take some time out from the demanding world of balletic performance to regain her health. She has a serious eating disorder, which she has developed to maintain her slimness for her career. In the novel, you describe Ella’s battles with food unflinchingly. Can you tell us what drew you to create this character in particular?

I created her around 2012 when I wrote my book Now following you. I set up a scenario involving three sisters – one an aspiring writer, one a successful dancer and one a medical doctor and scientist. The first sister featured in Now following you, the third in Spire and the second in The school gates. I locked myself into the character of Ella Burchell at an early stage. All I knew about her was that she was in a controlling relationship with her manager, who was also her romantic partner, that she was a celebrated dancer and that she had an eating disorder. I previously wrote about an eating disorder in my first published book, Trinity rising. Trinity’s best friend from school develops anorexia while in first year at UCT. Eating disorders have always fascinated me as a response to disorder in a person’s life. It seems to be an attempt to take control amid a chaotic situation.

You set the story in an upmarket village on the North Coast of KwaZulu-Natal, in the world of private school and excessive privilege. Most of us can imagine many of the elite towns on that coast being very similar. Have you spent much time on this coast, and do you think the mindset of the competitive mothers there is any different from that of the tiger moms in Gauteng or Cape Town, for example?

My acquaintance with the KZN North Coast comes from family holidays. I enjoy the freedom of creating a fictional small town to set a novel in. There is no one to tell me that I got the details wrong or must have based a particular place on a real-life equivalent. I think that small-town tiger moms can be just as competitive as their city counterparts. I wanted to make the point that competitive parenting has become a worldwide phenomenon. Anxiety about the so-called “global marketplace” has made parents push their children harder in every country that has a middle-class population.

The “Ballet Moms” you describe are all too familiar to me. When my daughter was young, she was keen to dance and do ballet. She attended classes happily and unself-consciously from the age of six. However, the pressure of the other mothers on me and on her to conform to their stereotype of who a ballet dancer is, what size she should be and what she should look like was just too much for both of us. The nastiness of the moms was beyond belief, and it sprung from their need to make their daughters the best. For example, one mother was training her six-year-old daughter to be Miss Junior South Africa at the time. It didn’t take long for both my daughter and me to realise that fun was not to be had in this particular arena. Have you had similar experiences, and is this why you chose to write this book?

I did ballet as a child, and so did both my daughters. They were lucky enough to have a wonderful teacher who put no pressure on them and made the experience lovely. But I quickly realised that she was the exception, rather than the rule. Some ballet teachers and parents took it all far too seriously. And, as my children grew up, I saw parents who seemed to believe that every child needs to be a mini Einstein and Beethoven and Ronaldo and Margot Fonteyn. When do they get to be just kids?

The eating disorder Ella suffers from is well described. Do you think that eating disorders are more prevalent in the ballet world, or is it still a generalised problem, mainly among young girls?

I heard an interesting podcast recently about how the earliest mention of eating disorders has been traced back to the 1600s, and how there seem to be the same number of anorexic people now as there ever were. The ballet world certainly used to impose more rigid expectations of how a woman’s body should look than it currently does. Dancers have become taller and more muscular than before, which is pleasing to see. My character’s eating disorder stems more from the control exerted over her by her manager than from ballet itself.

It was such a pleasure to read a novel which focuses on a single protagonist for the most part. I have grown so tired of terribly “clever” narratives which feel a desperate need to switch between many, many characters to show their dexterity. Was this a deliberate style choice, or is it just the way this story turned out?

This is an intimate story that focuses on the personal growth of the main character. It felt right to construct it as a close, third-person narrative. The multiple-perspective story has certainly gained in popularity recently, but there is still room for a story with a narrower focus.

Do you have any particular preference for any genre or subject matter, or do you like moving between genres just for a change of pace?

I wouldn’t want to read only one genre for the rest of my life, so I wouldn’t want to write in only one either. My reading tastes are fairly omnivorous, as are the stories I am interested in telling. I suspect I would get bored if I wrote only one kind of book for the rest of my career.

How do you keep up your pace of production? Do you write a certain number of hours a day, or do you write only when a story is brewing?

I try to write a set number of words every weekday, but sometimes life gets in the way. I found the pandemic quite destructive to my concentration. It is easier to focus now that vaccines have become so freely available.

  • Lacuna is the winner of the Sala Novel Award and winner of the Humanities and Social Sciences Award for the Novel.
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