The Servants’ Quarters by Lynn Freed

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 978 0 15 11288 6

If the test of the writer’s craft is in making both good and bad characters equally compelling and readable, then Lynn Freed certainly aces this one. Her book, ’The Servants’ Quarters’, has some supremely unlikeable characters, be it the beautiful and aimless narrator, Cressida, her grasping mother or their wealthy benefactor, Mr Harding . And yet, this slim book with its spare and fluid narrative keeps you hooked and eager to know the fate of these frail, flawed people.

Set in an unnamed location in South Africa in the years following World War II, the story follows the relationship between Cressida and Harding over a decade. When they first meet, she is a precocious nine year old with a father in a coma, facing imminent financial ruin, while he is a much older war veteran who has suffered severe disfigurement in combat. For reasons not immediately clear, he begins supporting the family, even moving them to the servants’ quarters of his own house. His mentoring of Cressida seems avuncular (if condescending) at first, but soon begins to take on more predatory overtones that people around them either do not notice or choose not to. For all her reservations and despite knowing about his other affairs, Cressida is slowly drawn toward the man and he becomes the only stable constant in her life, and her most important influence, as things around her change. She blooms into a beautiful teenager, struggling with her silent love for Harding and her yearning to be free of her mother. She is directionless, bored, and casually toys with men who are besotted with her, even as she waits for Harding to notice her and whisk her away to his world of privilege.

As much as this is a love story, it is also a frank examination of the dynamics between rich and poor in the claustrophobic town that Cressida lives in , and that both she and her mother long to be freed from. Intertwined with these stories is a narrative on the devastating consequences of war, be it on Harding who has survived combat and prisoner camps, or the young Jewish Cressida who is haunted for years by nightmares of German soldiers . This shared anguish becomes a bonding force between the two, even as the people around them remain indifferent to it or choose to move on.

If you are looking for a story about a girl finding her wings and flying away, of a love that sets her free ..this isn't it. A bleakness hangs over the narrative, reminiscent of Dickens - the voice of the narrator grows from that of a knowing, free spirited child to that of a more cynical woman, changed forever by Harding's unwholesome attentions.If Harding is drawn to her fierce spirit as a child, he also manages to squash it completely over the years, leaving her an infatuated teenager with little on her mind but him. As a child she has been tormented by the fate of millions of Jews like her in the War, yet as a grownup the apartheid that must surely have existed around her at the time, never once finds mention. Clearly, Cressida's world has shrunk from the boundlessness of her childhood, to the social and emotional distance that separates her from her warped Daddy long legs. The biggest tragedy for me here was that, despite her revulsion for her grasping and opportunistic mother, and despite being offered the chance to go to university and escape this town on her own terms, Cressida nonetheless ends up just like her mother in many ways.

Freed keeps a clear unflinching eye on her characters, charting their lives with prose that is at once precise and nonjudgmental. You may never like Cressida or Harding, you may flinch at the idea of their romance, yet when it does come about, you cannot help hoping they find a golden sunset to walk into. If this is 'Beauty and the Beast' retold, it is also a retelling that captures the beasts within every one of its characters, as they strive to be redeemed by love from the worst in themselves.

Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith

This debut novel by a young English author skilfully recreates the bleak and harsh days of Stalinist Russia. It also introduces an interesting new hero in crime fiction, Officer Leo Demidov, a committed cog in the communist machinery whose life is upturned by an epiphany.


It is Moscow, 1953. Leo Demidov is a fast rising star in the MGB (State Security Committee, later replaced by the KGB) and a man who passionately believes in the State and the oppressive measures it uses, to establish the ideals it stands for. He himself is a willing participant in these measures, arresting and torturing suspected spies and dissidents,often on flimsy evidence. And since crime is considered a capitalist failing caused by poverty, the Communist state must necessarily be projected as crime-free - another illusion he happily supports.Until the bodies of mutilated children begin appearing, he witnesses the murder of innocent citizens by his subordinate and starts to question his beliefs.


Then, even as he invites the wrath of his superiors, he begins investigating what he suspects is the work of a serial killer. Faced with opportunistic subordinates and a government eager to squash what it considers his anti-State activities, he quickly finds himself arrested, tortured and demoted. Yet he soldiers on, escaping murder attempts and deportation to a gulag until he finds his answers in a shocking finale, in a place far from Moscow yet closer to him than he realizes.


At one level, this book is about a hunt for a vicious killer. At another, it plots the slow unraveling of a man's faith in everything he has believed in - his employer, the society he has helped build, his wife's loyalties. As he is reduced to the state of the common man he once terrorized as a MGB officer, Demidov realizes the suffering he has helped cause. He also finds the most unlikely allies in his quest - fellow prisoners, his boss in the militia he is bumped down into, his own estranged wife.


It is also a chilling story of a villain far more vicious than the killer - the State itself. This is a terrifying world of paranoia, violated civil liberties and the repression of a whole nation by a regime focused on ideals it cannot really afford to realize. It is a society far from equal -even as the marginalized are left deprived and victimized, corruption and nepotism thrive in the creamy layer of government employees and aye-sayers. It is a society that, for all its talk of equal opportunities and the greater common good, is finally responsible for creating the killer, and all the other criminals it is so desperate to ignore.


I enjoyed the break neck speed at which the plot proceeds, and the minimal yet effective prose. This is a classic thriller - it opens with a bang, pops up dead bodies and red herrings with clockwork regularity, and moves ahead at a swift, action packed pace before ending with yet another bang. The murder of children is always a troubling subject - it unearths our own primeval fears about the evil and perversion that lies dormant in people. It is also always symbolic (atleast in fiction) of the perpetrator's own childhood, of some suffering he or she might have endured. So it's a given that, at some point, the reader is overwhelmed not by the atrocities committed by the villain, but an image of him/ her as a traumatized child. For all that, I was still unprepared for how things turned out here, for a climax that was at once sad and shocking.


The book ends with more than one hint of a sequel, so here's looking forward to more Demidov mysteries soon. And, quite probably, a movie version too.


I'm on a sort of Russia trip these days, if only as an armchair traveller - after Child 44, the two books I'm currently reading are connected to that fascinating region too. One is the terrific Strange Telescopes, that can only be described as anti-travel writing. The other is the English translation of the Russian scifi best seller, The Stranger. Both explore parallel realities, entire worlds existing out of the ordinary - much like the communist state of Child 44. And much like this novel, very, very unputdownable.

Watch this space!