Anyone who has ever had to hire someone to look after their children in their own home knows that it is unlike any other working arrangement. The contractual lines should be the same – fair salary, paid holidays, disciplinary measures if anything goes wrong – but they are also a civilised gloss on something far messier: physical and emotional intimacy, a requirement of absolute trust in a stranger and a power relationship whose collateral damage, if things go wrong, can easily be visited on a defenceless child. And not only the child. In her Prix Goncourt-winning novel, which has taken France by storm, Leïla Slimani’s brilliantly executed insight is that there is great emotional jeopardy for everyone involved.
She begins with the children, her first lines – “The baby is dead. It only took a few seconds” – setting the plot efficiently, relentlessly in motion. Everything is tinged with dread, the reader questioning how the baby and his older sister came to die – material that Slimani weaves into a wide net in which to snare all sorts of wriggling creatures. Louise, the nanny, was perfect (there are clear nods to that other perfect fictional nanny, Mary Poppins). The children loved her. She cooked and she cleaned for Myriam, a lawyer of north African heritage, and her music producer husband Paul; the mechanism of the household ran smoothly at last. Moreover, Louise seemed to gain total satisfaction from enabling others to thrive.
Slimani, a French-Moroccan writer and journalist, has two children, and in her first novel to be translated into English she puts “the warm secret world of childhood” front and centre: the banal details of bathtime, the ins and outs of a game of hide and seek. Louise enters into the children’s games, more fully, sometimes, than the children themselves. In one game she observes them from her hiding place as they are distressed by not finding her, she “watches them as if she’s studying the death throes of a fish she’s just caught, its gills bleeding, its body shaken by spasms”. Their relief when they discover her binds them to her, holds them close.
Slimani presses all the obvious buttons: the fear of what happens when the parents are not there, and the coldness possible with children who are not one’s own. The self-delusions: “It’s too hard for her. It must be tough, seeing all the things she’s not allowed to do,” says one of Louise’s previous employers, justifying why they will not include Louise’s daughter in the games their children play. The hypocrisies, and especially liberal hypocrisies – Paul is the son of a radical 1960s mother who turns out to be socially conservative when it comes to Myriam’s motherhood; and he finds it impossible to be a boss honestly, because of what that does to his comforting vision of who he is.
Myriam has been a brilliant law student; Slimani is forensic about the choices presented to women who have assumed they can attain equality and intellectual self-fulfilment, but suddenly find themselves “confined to the world’s edge”, as she describes a new mother in a playground. These women, desperate to hold on to their sense of self, unintentionally help to perpetuate the subjugation of other women: it is no accident that Slimani chose to make Louise, unlike most of the other nannies she encounters, not African or Filipina, but white, and French; the inequality is more clearly about income and educational opportunity. “A white woman doing an immigrant’s job,” Slimani has said, “is extremely demeaning”; Louise is also, of course, working for someone of immigrant background – yet another potent element to add to a relationship already full of possibilities for thoughtless humiliation.
Louise’s emotional background is another minefield. When Myriam and Paul are away, she does show true affection to her charges – and here Slimani finds even more dangerous buttons to push. Nanny books advise prospective employers to ask about the applicant’s childhood and relationship to their own parents – which is appallingly intrusive, but solid advice, because nannies, like parents, bring all their previous emotional life to the care of children, whether they choose to or not. Why are they doing this work? What, apart from economic necessity, is being played out?
Louise has one friend, another nanny, an undocumented immigrant called Wafa who cheerfully tells her “the details of a life that will never be recorded” – which is really the conceit of Slimani’s novel: who is the nanny really, behind her professional smile? What is the emotional effect of her work? Louise is haunted, eventually, “by the feeling she has seen too much, heard too much of other people’s privacy” – when they have never registered that she might have such a thing herself.
It would have been easy, and narratively effective, for Slimani to build a picture of a psychopath; it’s clear, in the kind of mythic language she uses and from the occasional slightly overdone gothic touch, that she was tempted. She achieves the far more interesting feat, however, of playing entirely valid points of view against each other, sometimes in consecutive sentences: one minute we are seeing things from Louise’s point of view; in the next her face is blank and we are outside again, with the parents. Rather like childhood, Slimani’s novel arrives at its inevitable climax through an accretion of seeming banalities and mundane pressures.
This is a political book about emotional work, about women and children and their costs and losses. But, partly because Slimani looks so clearly at these losses, not only giving them their due, but placing them carefully for full narrative impact, Lullaby also works as a thriller, which is quite a balancing act to pull off.
• Aida Edemariam’s The Wife’s Tale will be published by 4th Estate in February.
Lullaby is translated by Sam Taylor and published by Faber. To order a copy for £9.74 (RRP £12.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
