The Observations

The Observations is a proper novel: fat, heartwarming, funny and genuinely affecting. Though Bessy, our hero, narrates her tale in that contraction-free style you might call ‘period default’, she’s is definitely more crack ho than Jane Eyre: a cynical, uppity, fifteen-year-old Irish girl with a take on life that’s as much Straight Outta Compton as the nineteenth century Glasgow she inhabits. And that’s part of what’s to love, of course: she speaks from a time when she simply wouldn’t have been permitted to.

Raised, or rather thrown up, by her drunken, greedy, hooker mum then forced into the same line of employment, Bessy finds what feels like heaven at fourteen when she’s let to an ancient Jewish businessman, who fattens her on Parma violets and dresses her in yellow satin. When he dies, Bessy leaves town; her only possessions are her beloved sugar-daddy’s last bit of excrement (Harris is capable of some very dark touches), two pilfered shillings and six Parma violets.

En route to Edinburgh, she lands a job as a factotum in a big house. Arabella, her new mistress, is a woman with some unhealthy obsessions, and is secretly writing a book on the ‘ideal servant’. She measures Bessy’s skull and the bridge of her nose, has her engage in pointless obedience exercises, and teaches her to punctuate, over long evenings by the fire. Arabella has mood swings and mysteries and perfect skin, and Bessy falls in love with her. Bessy doesn’t say this; indeed Bessy would deny this - but Harris, rather masterfully, shows us just why she would, and just how she does.

If this is a novel without a boy/girl love story (think about it: they’re rare), what’s remarkable is that we don’t miss it for an instant. The softly-trodden, patient development of Bessy’s intensifying, selfless devotion for her mistress is an admirable feat of narrative control. When Bessy realizes, much too late, that Arabella isn’t receiving all the terrestrial channels, at the moment she might truly avenge her tribe – her disposable predecessors who have been “observed” and studied – Bessy wants nothing more than to save her beloved mistress.

Being a contemporary novel, we inevitably find the odd self-reflexive twitch. Bessy tells us that the book she is writing may not be that well punctuated, but it’s a damn sight better than when she started; The Observations is itself Bessy’s suggested title for Arabella’s mad handbook (Arabella remarks that it’s not a great one, either – into which we might reasonably read a bit of entirely unnecessary ass-covering from the author); and Bessy’s story, Bessy explains, was itself written at the request of … you get the idea. But fashionable – or perhaps merely culturally symptomatic – tics aside, The Observations succeeds where most novels of any time fail: it makes the reader forget what is obviously going to happen in the course of its plot, while reminding them of some rather obvious things we tend to forget about real life. In this case, that growth, change and even happy endings are really possible.

Hell, call me old-fashioned, but reading so much recent fiction one so often finds oneself - like Homer in that famous Simpsons’ episode - raging at the heavens, No comeuppance! I mean Rochester hardly goes blind for no reason: nope, he wronged the girl, and similarly anyone who messes with Bessy gets satisfyingly and firmly swatted with the fat hand of divine justice. In life, too, folk occasionally plain get what they deserve - and it’s refreshing to read a book brave enough to break with the crowd and say so.

Don Paterson is a poet, editor and musician and teaches at the University of St Andrews. Recent publications include Orpheus, The Book of Shadows and Landing Light. Landing Light won the Whitbread Poetry Prize and the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry.