The Snow Ball – Brigid Brophy (1964) 196 pages

Brigid Brophy is an author who I’ve been meaning to try for a while, and The Snow Ball was a compelling introduction. It has an otherworldly quality, set over the course of one evening at the titular event and based on Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

An eighteenth-century fancy dress ball is being thrown by Anne and her fourth husband Tom-Tom at their Georgian London residence.  We follow Anna, Anne’s friend and confidant, throughout the evening. She is dressed as Donna Anna.

“Everyone grew a year older at once on New Year’s Eve, even those whose birthdays had been the day before. They gathered, Anna decided, for consolation: wearing historical costume to offset the advance of history.”

The incongruity and inaccuracy of the visual experience is used by Brophy to great effect, emphasising the unreality of the evening and showing how easily appearances can crack.

“Anna descended the grand staircase, knowing that Voltaire and Lady Hamilton were waiting for her in the crowd at the bottom. The noise, the scents, the very warmth of the people’s skins came to her as unmistakably twentieth century.”

Brophy has some startling images too, truly original turns of phrase. The décor is somewhat Rococo, with crumbling gold cherubs adorning the walls:

“It was as though between this room and Anna there was a genetic resemblance, a line of descent: as though it were a womb: into which, a newly born cherub in her early forties, she was always welcome to creep back.”

As this middle-aged cherub moves around the party she draws the attention of a man dressed in a black mask as Don Giovanni. She is also watched by Ruth, young and inexperienced, attending her first ball dressed as Cherubino and writing in her diary throughout the night:

“Feel there is something awful about all the people in the world, can’t think what they are here for—they don’t seem to matter—they are like atoms—they just move around without aim attracted or repelled by each other; hardly matters which. Anna K. is the most attractive woman I have ever seen. I detest her.”

We follow the seductions of the night, the dances people engage in both literally and metaphorically. Anna is a slightly subdued character next to the driven sexuality of Don Giovanni or the gregarious sociability of her friend Anne. Yet she is compelling as she tries to work out what happiness looks like for her as a recently divorced woman, against a background of revelry.

(Unlike its source inspiration, the seduction in The Snow Ball is explicitly successful and mutually consensual.)

The Snow Ball is eerie and unnerving while being recognisable. Its characters take pragmatic decisions surrounded by elevated theatricality – at one point peppermint creams rain down. It felt like a masque, but grounded in believable people rather than stock caricatures. It was hugely clever but not alienating and it’s definitely made me keen to pull Brophy’s The King of a Rainy Country out of the TBR.

“‘Have you noticed what a metaphysical ball this is?’ he said. ‘All these people bumping into one another and asking “Who are you?” even when they’ve known each other for years.’”