It requires a leap of the imagination

It can be a combustible business when writers play with the public’s memory of a superstar. Think Albert Goldman and Elvis. All the more perilous if the writer is a novelist who appropriates the name of the figure but little else beyond the bare bones of biography, creating instead a story of almost pure imagination.

So Colum McCann admits he was nervous to learn that copies of “Dancer,” his ambitious novel drawing inspiration from the life of ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, were landing in the hands of ballet critics and conventional biographers for review.

“Some of the dance critics and biographers find my approach incendiary,” said the 36-year-old New York-based McCann, fretting again as he walked along the banks of London’s River Thames one morning in January. “I want this to be seen as a work of storytelling, a piece of language, not a piece of documentary evidence.

“And so far I’ve been lucky,” McCann continued. “Most people seem to get what I’m trying to do.” He paused and smiled. “But I’m still sort of expecting a ballet fatwa, you know.”

There is a mischievous degree of wish in his statement. Controversy does court attention. But the reviewers’ clique has been almost universally enthusiastic about “Dancer,” a novel that careens through the life of the mercurial genius at its center -- “the character I call Nureyev,” as McCann puts it -- and shows the love and inspiration and damage he left on all those with whom he collided.

The Irish-born author was in London for the launch of promotional interviews (he’ll be in L.A. Monday) and admitted to being excited by the prospect of a lunch meeting with two of Nureyev’s lovers later that day. Though McCann said he feared a grilling on the usual questions (“If it’s a novel, why didn’t you just call the character something else?”), the meeting turned into a magical moment, the writer recalled later in a phone call from New York, with the men telling him his book had succeeded in touching Nureyev’s spirit. One of them, according to McCann, “said he couldn’t bear to finish the book because he felt like he was finishing Rudi’s life all over again.”

The real Nureyev’s life ended in tears, of course, a dancer whose body was quitting on his soul by the time of his death at 54. He died in 1993, another on the ghastly roll call of those killed by AIDS.

But what a monumental life. A boy born on a train traveling through Siberia -- raised in a poor Ural village traumatized by returning veterans of World War II -- who grew to possess an insatiable desire to dance that kept him leaping even when his father was trying to beat the love of ballet out of him. He became a beacon of Soviet cultural braggadocio during the Cold War, only to spin away from his KGB minders at a Paris airport in 1961 and into the arms of the gendarmerie of freedom.

From there it was party on. Nureyev wowed Western dance audiences out of their seats in the theater and then turned his life into performance art, consorting with European royalty and Euro-trash alike, and sliding through New York’s gay 1970s underworld with what turned out to be fatal recklessness. As McCann says, “he could step into any room, anywhere in the world, whether it be the backroom of a seedy bar or Princess Grace’s living room or the dressing room at the Royal Ballet, and always be desired, always be the sort of person who could change the electricity in the room.”

To create a moment of beauty

It is that texture McCann tries to convey in “Dancer,” his fifth book. His Nureyev is charmingly impish, insolent, infuriating and always irresistible. He is capable of great cruelty and generosity. Just like the real man except, says McCann, every scene is made up.

The novel dispenses with most of the facts and gets straight to meditation on more ambitious turf: the Sisyphean struggle by artists to create a moment of beauty and then retain the rapture. McCann is intrigued by the lasting effect our lives have on others, no matter how casual the contact, even long after we’ve moved on.

Biographical details are almost incidental. The drama of Nureyev’s defection is never even described; we merely turn a page to find it has occurred. McCann cares about what the defection does to people, from the ugly political repercussions to those Rudi leaves behind (“there is no soap and the handle of the toilet is broken,” complains his bitter sister), to his own pain at being barred by Soviet authorities from going home to see his dying mother.

“To be away from home is to be away from everything that made me,” McCann’s Nureyev writes to his sister from the West. “And to be away from everything that made me, when it dies, is my own death. Darkness touches darkness everywhere.”

Stylistically, “Dancer” is a leap itself. Nureyev’s story is told from many angles, from the husband and daughter of his first dance teacher to the perfectionist London craftsman who made his ballet slippers. Jagger, Warhol and JFK have cameos, but McCann is just as interested in the view of the male hustlers.

His Nureyev is also sculpted by Rudi’s entries in a fictional diary, “the one thing I thought I’d never be able to pull off,” McCann says. “The further I got into it, the more I started thinking: This person is unknowable.” The real Nureyev, he said, “told all these lies about himself because he wanted to create this character. But perhaps my point is that we are vastly unknowable,” McCann said. “And in the end, there is no one way to tell anybody’s story.”

Yet his Nureyev is not completely imagined. Biographers have been over this ground, laying down a road map to understanding a spectacular life. “Clearly, the characters that aren’t invented are informed by my book, and McCann hews pretty closely to it,” said New York-based biographer Diane Solway, who spent five years, including long stretches in Russia, collecting documents and interviewing people for her 1998 “Nureyev: His Life.” “McCann’s sensibility about certain characters is very familiar to me. I feel like I gave him the sense, the framework to understand a number of his relationships, for example, between Nureyev and his father.”

Still, McCann wants authenticity too. His Nureyev may exit the novel with a pirouette, the impending death from AIDS ignored. But the story opens with a ferocious piece of writing depicting the lives of Soviet troops during the retreat stage of World War II. McCann also traveled to Russia and interviewed veterans of that war in their military hospitals where, he said, “you could at least get the taste of a face.” He also tapped the New York Public Library, where he found a Red Army manual for survival in winter war. It had never been taken out, he said.

Clearly he wants credit for accuracy in his storytelling, which is why he got such a kick out of his reception from Nureyev’s former lovers in London.

“They were speculating where certain lines had come from and how I had known certain things,” McCann said, pride busting through. “ ‘Oh, you must have talked to certain people,’ they said. ‘Nobody could have known that. That was a secret, you know.’

“And the thing is,” McCann said with satisfaction, “I didn’t talk to anybody. I made it all up.”

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Colum McCann reading

When: Monday, 7 p.m.

Where: Dutton’s Brentwood Books, 11975 San Vicente Blvd., Brentwood

Contact: (310) 476-6263