THE OBSERVATIONS
by Jane Harris

Faber £12.99 pp432

Publishers these days seem to spend much of their time chasing the successes of their rivals. One would have thought Jane Harris’s accomplished, enjoyable first novel could perfectly well stand on its own two feet without anyone having to draw unhelpful comparisons with Sarah Waters or Michel Faber. Since these contrasts are invited, however, we can start by saying that while The Observations appears to doff its mobcap to Waters’s Fingersmith without achieving that novel’s irresistible narrative hold or its genuinely startling plot twists, it does at least, unlike Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, provide the reader with a satisfying conclusion.

The book is supposedly written at the instigation of some “distinguished gentlemen” by a young Irish woman called Bessy Buckley. In 1863, at the age of 15, Bessy gets a job as a maid in a run-down house in rural Scotland. Her employers are James Reid, a penny-pinching Scot with political ambitions, and Arabella, his beautiful English wife, to whom Bessy forms a deep attachment. Arabella herself takes an unusual interest in her new maid, making anthropometric measurements of her, asking her to perform apparently meaningless tasks, and instructing her to keep a diary of daily activities. Bessy is disillusioned when she discovers Arabella is making a study of her in a notebook titled “Observations on the Habits and Nature of the Domestic Class in My Time”, and becomes jealous when she is compared unfavourably with an earlier maid who mysteriously disappeared. She decides to teach her mistress a lesson, but the trick she plays has disastrous consequences.

The familiar ingredients of the 19th-century “sensational” novel are all here: locked rooms, strange apparitions, hints about sexual irregularity, mental derangement, violent deaths, guttering candles, dense fogs. What lifts the book out of the ordinary is Bessy’s compelling narrative voice. Thanks to a spell in the employment of “an old bachelor gentleman” called Mr Levy, Bessy is literate and has a sophisticated vocabulary. However, as Arabella complains: “You write as you speak without pausing for breath.” Lessons on the use of the comma mean that Bessy’s narrative is always coherent, although she never masters the possessive form of nouns and her spelling remains delightfully erratic. To considerable comic effect, Bessy lurches between newly acquired elegancies and a lively demotic, especially when (mis)reporting her employers’ words: “After a pause, missus expressed some doubts about whether the tea service had seen its best days. Would it not be far better, she proposed, to postpone until a smarter set had been acquired? Balderdash, goes master James, there was bog all wrong with the china.”

Bessy’s reminiscences of her squalid Dublin upbringing are economical, vivid and unsentimental, and her description of life with Mr Levy is curiously touching. A dictionary of Irish slang is credited in the acknowledgments, which may be the source of some of Bessy’s riper expressions, but Harris has woven these seamlessly into the narrative, creating a funny and original voice for her diminutive but worldly heroine.

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