As a child, I was horrified and fascinated by the Lord Lucan scandal. Dominating the news in 1974, it had ideal elements for the tabloids: aristocrats behaving badly, the bludgeoning to death of a pretty young woman, and the killer’s disappearance. Jill Dawson’s 10th novel challenges the salacious history of this “murder mystery” by examining the life of the victim – the family’s nanny, Sandra Rivett.
Dawson has often taken true stories and made them her own, in books ranging from 2016’s The Crime Writer, about the novelist Patricia Highsmith, to 2003’s Wild Boy, a marvellous retelling of the life of the feral child of Aveyron. The Great Lover focused on poet Rupert Brooke, while the heartbreaking, Orange prize-shortlisted Fred and Edie explored the life of Edith Thompson, hanged for murdering her husband in 1923. Dawson’s ear for voice, eye for detail and empathy for the strange complexities of the human heart make her ideal to take on a story that has been coarsened and distorted by notoriety, misogyny and class bias.
In upending male-dominated versions of history and myths, Dawson joins a welcome literary trend. Madeline Miller’s Circe, focusing on a marginal figure from the Odyssey, and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, which makes Briseis the protagonist, are longlisted for the Women’s prize. Meanwhile, in non-fiction Hallie Rubenhold has shifted the spotlight away from Jack the Ripper to examine the lives of his victims in The Five.
As The Language of Birds opens, 26-year-old Mandy River, based on Rivett, follows her friend Rosy to become a London nanny. Both are from disadvantaged families in the Fens (Dawson’s home and a recurring location in her writing), and met as patients in a psychiatric clinic. Rosy hears birds speaking: “Help, help,” the gulls seem to say. But The Language of Birds is also a play on “birds” as slang for girls, whose words are often unheard. Rosy is a uniformed Norland nanny, but Mandy wings it. Arriving for an interview with the Countess of Morvern, she is handed a screaming baby and 10-year-old James while her employer goes off to sleep (“Or my head will explode”). Lady Morvern is far more psychologically vulnerable than the nanny, and her estranged husband has detectives spying on the house; upper-class emotional neglect smells worse than the soaking nappies.
The complex intersections of the mother-baby-nanny triangle and the loneliness of childcare are beautifully depicted. “Other people’s children. It’s a bit too intimate sometimes to hold somebody else’s baby. To smell it. Peel off its little things, to swab at the most private and tender places with Vaseline and shower on baby talc, like shaking pepper over a steak. It’s a funny old job,” thinks Rosy, who narrates sections of the book in the first person. Mandy’s sections are in the third person, but while she is proxy mother for Lady Morvern and will soon be proxy victim, she is the star of the story.
Nannies in literature range from the perfection of Mary Poppins to the dream-turned-nightmare in Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby. Mandy, however, is a normal young woman making her way through the colourful contradictions of 1970s London. She buys shiny red boots and meets her Caribbean boyfriend in the pub. Abba plays on the jukebox; there are Walnut Whips and gonks; graffiti reads “Keep Britain White” and the IRA is planting bombs. Stranger to recollect are the rigid class barriers: the park bench reserved for nannies “with titled mummies” and Lord Morvern’s suave, privileged elegance allowing him to get away with intimidation and thuggery. “Daddy called Mummy a neurotic bitch from hell,” says poor little James. “Mummy fell down. He gave her some pills and now she won’t wake up.”
Lord Morvern attempts to befriend the nannies and takes Rosy to Annabel’s, the fashionable nightclub. Both women join him and the children for holidays on a Scottish island, though they remain mostly “below stairs”. His friends can’t believe he would harm, let alone kill, a woman with a length of lead pipe, after mistaking the nanny for his wife. For years there was public debate about whether Lucan was really the murderer – whether he’d been spotted in far-flung exotic locations, and whether his ex-wife was bonkers or lying. Dawson leaves us in no doubt about her views of the crime or, vitally, the threats, bullying and stalking that preceded it.
The narrative’s progress towards the terrifying evening in the dark basement kitchen has the ineluctable pull of tragic myth. We know what must come, but this knowledge never detracts from the memorable beauty and intelligence of the novel. By focusing on the victim, Dawson allows us to completely rethink the original story in a way that honours Sandra Rivett’s short life.
• Sofka Zinovieff’s novel Putney is published by Bloomsbury. The Language of Birds is published by Sceptre (£18.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
