Domestic noirs, aka "marriage thrillers", have been having a bit of a moment, but novelist Harriet Lane is upping the game, proving that female friendships can be just as toxically loaded with secrets and betrayals as the marriage bed. Her captivating debut, Alys, Always, was a literary All About Eve about a mousy copy editor who inveigles her way into the lives and home of a golden London family.
Now, confirming that she's cornered the market when it comes to unassuming but distinctly dangerous, creepy female protagonists, Lane's new novel, Her, is a powerful follow-up.
Emma and Nina are two women in their early 40s who live streets away from each other in north London but lead completely different lives.
Nina is a painter of established talent; she lives with her older husband, an architect, and her 17-year-old daughter, Sophie – the fruit of her now long-distant first marriage. She has an identity of her own, adolescent shyness now turned into reserve, and guardedness into self-possession. Nina's world is one of Prada coats, elegantly simple shift dresses, expensive restaurants and an idyllic French holiday home: she's one of those "pulled-together" women, a person "who can afford to take her time".
In sharp contrast, Emma is a prisoner of the "tyranny of domesticity" that is life with a toddler and a newborn baby. Emma can't afford childcare, especially now that she and her husband are a one-income household since she gave up work: "It's near-impossible to reconcile an only moderately successful freelance career like mine with family life."
After Nina finds and returns the purse Emma apparently lost during a trip to the local shops, thereafter thoughtfully stepping in to save the day again and again, the struggling mother is helplessly drawn to this woman who seems to be everything Emma isn't. But underneath her calm exterior Nina is a bundle of raw nerves, her encounters with Emma fuelled by her desire to exact a calculated revenge for something that happened so long ago that Emma doesn't even remember it.
Lane is a brilliant observer of the intricacies of the everyday. The chapters are split between the two women as they circle each other. Those chapters narrated from Emma's point of view often come across more powerfully, not just because we're tensely aware of her hapless position as Nina's unsuspecting victim, but because of Lane's wonderfully realistic portrayal of the boredom, defeat and frustration that constitutes the life of a woman weighed down by "the flat-out invisible drudgery of family maintenance, the vanishing of personality as everyone else's accrues".
Comparing the unsatisfying final plot twist of a holiday page-turner to a more measured everyday existence, Nina complains it's "nothing like life", reality turning "less on shocks or theatrics than on the small, quiet moments, misunderstandings or disappointments, the things that it's easy to overlook".
If only Lane could give her character one of her own novels to read, Nina would surely be much more satisfied. As seductive as it is chilling, Her is quality literary fiction meets psychological thriller, the devil of which is in the detail.
