I have just read that novel, the one that’s been translated into 18 languages with 17 more to come, the first line detailing the murder of two children at the hands of their nanny: “The baby is dead. It took only a few seconds.” If you are a certain kind of person, you will have heard about this book. If you are a certain kind of person that finds nature overwhelming, and suspense addictive, and occasionally seeks out soft places to press briefly with something sharp, if you are that kind of person, you will have heard about this book, Lullaby, about the parents, and the nanny, and the two children, dead.
Once, I spent a weekend with a group of rollercoaster enthusiasts. These men lived and worked purely for the monthly rush of three seconds in the air over Wootton. They’d carpool to Alton Towers, investigate the machines with their notepads cocked, then queue for the ride. The queuing, they explained, was just as important as the coasting – more so in some cases, because it allowed you to appreciate those last minutes on the ground, safe. It’s a cliché to say a story is a rollercoaster ride, but this book by Leila Slimani reminded me of these conversations. Except rather than the usual ups and downs, this begins with the shock, and the remaining pages are all hurtling backwards, filled with dread, and there’s no safety, because there’s no ground. You read the book very fast, in order to escape the murders. It’s a why-dunnit that unravels the history of Louise, the perfect nanny, a woman who has “only one desire” – a wish to “dig herself a niche, a burrow, a warm hiding place” within a family. And when she realises the children will soon cease to need her, something inside her – a safety catch – breaks.
The story will speak noisily to the middle-class women brought up to believe they could “have it all” with as little as possible said about the other women they must employ in order to do so. “I think maternal instinct is a male construct,” said Slimani, when discussing Lullaby, “that has been used for centuries to keep women in their place, at home.” “Behind every good man…” the sticky-voiced saying goes, ignoring the less glamorous truth of what hides behind every good mother – another woman, often a mother herself, a woman who will allow her to pursue a career, allow her to host a party without worrying too much about tomorrow’s mess, who will allow her to date, to stay late at the office, to work through half term.
The mother in the book starts referring to Louise (named for Louise Woodward, the au pair convicted of involuntary manslaughter of an eight-month-old baby) as “my nanny”, a woman she owns, who looks after not only the children but the entire family. She has bought comfort, a relief from guilt, she’s bought a woman who will dust away all the dull and repetitive tasks that come with adulthood, but in buying her freedom it becomes clear the mother is paying Louise to wear their chains.
Though you’ll find the recent comic novel Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine on quite the other side of the bookshop to Lullaby, the former pricked at me when reading the latter, because both – despite the murders, despite the jokes – are portraits of exquisite loneliness. Here is a subject that, with the appointment of the UK’s first Minister for Loneliness, many are considering seriously for the first time. But while much thought is being directed at the elderly (200,000 of whom have not had a conversation with a friend or relative in more than a month), it seems less has been given to the people who, as the title of Gail Honeyman’s debut novel suggests, appear “Completely Fine”, young people perhaps, who leave home but never manage to leave their halls of residence. Or those blessed new mothers who, as Slimane writes, sit on park benches on winter afternoons: “Staring into space. Like the one who gave birth recently and now finds herself confined to the world’s edge.” Or those women who have spent a lifetime caring for someone else, and who are suddenly not required, or those women who are stuck inside relationships so bad they don’t even realise they’re screaming.
Eleanor Oliphant is a woman who has survived abuse, but never learned the intricate dances required to make small talk, or how to make a friend. She goes home every Friday with a pizza and several bottles of vodka to knock herself out for the weekend, before returning to work on Monday, where her colleagues snigger at her behind cubicles. Louise is a woman who has also survived abuse, though survived, of course, is a tricky word, and who appears to have buried herself beneath a heavy subservient moss. She has nobody and she has nothing, and it’s this – a thick and gritty loneliness you can almost taste – that makes Lullaby an even darker story than it at first appears. It forces you to understand the wobbling mental health of a character left alone. You are scared, not of this little woman with her sharp sushi knife, but of the impossibilities of success, of the limits of what money can buy, and of the dangerous power of loneliness.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
