James Topham
posted 19 April 2007

Undoubtedly the Orange Prize is a good thing (albeit it is has now been renamed the Orange Broadband Prize and may well, in a sponsorship coup, soon become the Orange Broadband Only 14.99 For Unlimited Downloads Restrictions Apply Prize). One can barely quibble with a multinational organisation bequeathing some of its obscene wealth to the worthy cause of celebrating literary merit, and as such we should not begrudge Orange the free sponsorship call-out they receive every time the prize is mentioned.

That the laurels can only be won by a woman writer, however, is perhaps a little more open to gentle scepticism, especially since the male hegemony over literature’s top prize was finally ended last year by a Booker shortlist that favoured women two to one and which saw Kiran Desai finally triumph. Women novelists – Zadie Smith, Sarah Waters, Ali Smith, Kate Grenville, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - are the bright young things of the literary world; they are not marginalised voices clawing at the edges of the mainstream. There is a tipping point at which attempts to help redress the gender balance can outlast their usefulness and end up appearing hollow. What’s worse, they may do some considerable harm by implying that women need to be protected from male competition. That tipping point seems to be fast approaching. Women are competing on the bookshelves, in the salons and should certainly be allowed to do so in the tough arena of the multinational sponsored book award.

The Observations, a first-time novel by Jane Harris, is particularly in danger of being tarred with the label ‘women’s fiction’. It is a danger that one feels could have been better avoided if it had done a little more to avoid the stereotypes of the Victoriana literature that is very much the vogue since Sarah Waters and Michel Faber burst upon the scene. It is a tale of a young woman who has moved from Ireland to Scotland to start a new life. Bessy, the narrator of our tale, suddenly falls into a job as a maid to a beautiful upper middle class lady called Arabella. Her new mistress acts strangely, asking her to keep a record of her thoughts in a diary, and often drilling her in trivial and unrewarding tasks. However, despite this strange behaviour, Bessy becomes extremely attached to the lady of the house because of a kindness and understanding that she didn’t have in her native Ireland, where her villainous mother forced her into prostitution. Going through her mistress’ things one day, she finds a book that her mistress is secretly writing about the best way to train and discipline servants, called The Observations. In it she reads that her mistress considers her a poor servant and has found out about her dark past. She also learns more about her mistress’s relationship with another Irish maid who died whilst she was working at the house. Pricked by feelings of jealousy and betrayal, Bessy determines to trick her mistress into believing that the old maid is haunting the house, a decision which leads to terrible consequences.

The central selling point of the novel is its narrator, Bessy, a first person voice that is full of bawdy humour, commonsense adages, and colloquialisms galore. She is the kind of character who, on every page, demands to be recognised as a ‘character’, a ‘voice’. Hmm, one is supposed to say, a real, vital, human voice has been found here, what a wonderful, picaresque creation. In actuality, despite Harris’s careful examination of maids’ diaries from the period, and a good vocabulary of its colloquialisms, Bessy’s sense of speech comes across as no more realistic than that of Mrs Potts from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. Mannerisms, ticks of speech and thought, are a shortcut when it comes to characterisation; over the period of an entire novel something more concrete and more solid must emerge. I spent much of the novel desperate for Harris to subvert the initial blustering, easy-talking, unrestrained Bessy, to deconstruct the stereotype that she exploits with so much panache that I could not help that I was but think a postmodern volte-face was on its way. Very rarely these days does one find the opportunity to criticise a contemporary novel for failing to deliver enough postmodernism, but The Observations certainly merits the charge. Without an intellectual twist that shows an acknowledgement of Bessy the maid’s deeply caricatured nature, I felt as though Harris was offering me yesterday’s reheated left-overs and expecting me to eat as thought it were nouvelle cuisine.

This sense of desperation stayed with me throughout the book, a desire for Harris to make something out of her extremely promising premises. It was a feeling that stoked by Harris’s seemingly natural ability to create tension – and not just of the gothic ghost story kind – although she can crank up the supernatural excitement with the best of them. Rather, Harris has a gift of finding enormously interesting avenues to be explored and then forgetting to explore them. Of creating intellectual tension she is a grand master. A reader wonders what she is going to do with the spectres she raises, how she is going to explore, for example, the nature of servitude, the power of obsession, the ethics of nineteenth century prostitution, (we are even given a sniff of repressed Victorian lesbianism a la Sarah Waters). It is as though she is rushing through an old, cold house, tinderbox in hand, setting fires in every hearth. Unfortunately, she also seems to expend a similar amount of energy rushing around putting the fires out before they can catch light and threaten to consume her novel with any intellectual flame. At times, her fire-fighting seems almost perverse, she seems to take delight in stopping her narrative taking the reader anywhere remotely unsafe or out of the ordinary.

An excellent case in point is the supernatural element of the novel. For a few chapters the reader is given a feeling of deep ambiguity about the nature of the ghosts that haunt the old house and its mistress’ mind. Are they real, corporeal; can the phantoms of the mind be more destructive than the phantoms that walk an old house at night? However, this extremely effectively created atmosphere is very soon dissipated, and the remainder of the book has the same tone of dreary realism with which the novel began. The ghost story peters out, as does so much else in the novel, and one is left wondering whether an extremely promising lead as just been thrown away.

The book deals with sex in a similar way. Many of the recent contemporary novels that have drawn on this period in time have done so in order to play with the ambiguities of its sexual politics, to place our own supposed liberated era against the repression that was endemic in Victorian England. Sex is an important aspect of The Observations and yet the novel never really approaches it, never really questions it. Bessy is a bawdy, open character; a woman who because of her class and personal history can act outside of the social propriety as represented by the husband and wife whom she serves. And yet, whenever she is recounting sex – whether it be a scrambled fuck with a stable boy in order to express her feelings of self-loathing, or her attempts to recount her history as a child prostitute in Ireland, the narrative falls back on a ‘reader look away’ device; the uninhibited Bessy is too shy or too understanding of social propriety to enter into any real discussion of it. As such, you get the feeling that the novel wants to use Bessy’s history of prostitution as another short-cut to characterisation, rather than to explore it in a deep or complicated way, or to expose its horrors.

All in all The Observations is all about potentialities rather than fulfilment. It does have potential, as does Harris, who is a first-time novelist and perhaps needs more books under her belt before she successfully bridges the gap between the different techniques of short story and film and the longer novelistic form. The book is too episodic, one feels, and too lacking in an overall artistic or philosophical structure. Harris has a feel for the representation of longing, and perhaps she should have risked her pristine character by allowing Bessy to be less likeable, and examining more precisely the impulses behind her love for the woman who employs her. Her writing shows a good eye for comedy, and the plot flows along nicely, taking its reader’s interest with it, though I felt the book was a little on the long side. I’d like to see a novel from Harris that was a shorter, tighter work, and one that draws its characters from a sense of life and the world rather than aiming for the larger-than-life narratorial persona that is this book’s central flaw.

James Topham is creator and editor of the online arts journal, the roundtable review, which seeks to cross disciplinary boundaries and showcase the best young talent from the arts world. He spends his time writing, editing, reviewing fiction and theatre, and generally affecting an air of studied bohemianism.