a novel by Tracy Ryan
Published Fremantle Press 2002 (Australia)
"an attractively moody and allusive piece of writing"
--The Canberra Times
"Tracy Ryan has not only a fantastic story-telling style but an amazing insight into the core of the human interior with all its fears and possibilities."
--Susan Holmes, Overland
Jas hardly knows Todd. But seduced into escaping her struggling expatriate existence in London through marriage, she finds herself suddenly launched into a life of wealthy bohemians and intellectuals. In this strange country, locked into a world of intense longing and desire, Jas becomes uncertain of her own emotions and obligations.
From the flyleaf:
Neither one thing nor the other, belonging nowhere, Jas bumps along from one experience to the next... Her words begin to unravel for us where the romance novel usually ends. Marriage is the question, not the answer. And then she finds Miriam...
Inspired by the 'Pilgrimage' novels of Dorothy Richardson, Jazz Tango revisits and pays tribute to the modernist desire to convey female consciousness. But it is also a quest in its own right, concerned with the nature of responsibility toward oneself and others.
Ryan's concern is to show us the world through the eyes of a sensitive young woman failing to find the link between self and experience.
Jazz Tango is narrated as a breathless interior monologue as Jas ghosts through the world, open to every psychic wind that blows...
Jazz Tango (an underground term for bisexuality) locks us up for a year inside the mind of this dysfunctional young woman, staring at the walls of her inner world.
The surprise is that this confinement does not become suffocating. Just as hijacked hostages are said to bond with their captors, so we come to identify with Jas' alienated state.
We wish her to be at ease. She becomes our designated scapegoat, bearing our own secret insecurities, awkwardness with strangers, doubts about friends, loneliness in new settings...