Joanne Harris: Sleep, Pale Sister

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Before the sensational success of Chocolat, and then her other sensuous, food-based novels Blackberry Wine and Five Quarters of the Orange, Joanne Harris had already written a novel — this one, which has now been re-released for a second bite at the cherry.

Superficially it's different to the others, being an English Victorian gothic (as opposed to French magical romance), with repellent, frightening themes of authoritarian control, paedophilia and murder. Yet it's clearly from the same hand. There's the same fairytale acceptance of the mystical and mythical; there's even a circus, and a counter-culture woman with strange powers and ambivalent virtue.

The central characters are all rather creepy. The heroine, Effy, is an ethereal girl, arrested in her development (or so it appears) when, 10 years old, she was plucked from the park one day to became an artist's model for the austere Henry Chester.

Chester paints the worst sort of Victorian kitsch, an endless series of paintings featuring his muse as the little beggar girl, Sleeping Beauty, Juliet in the tomb ... "Every canvas showed her in some macabre, gloomy role ... dying, dead, sick, blind, abandoned," remarks another character. As the story progresses, the significance of the "sick longings" expressed in his paintings becomes clear.

Henry, obsessed with Effy, eventually marries her when she turns 17. She is, he believes, his creation, and he keeps her sedated with laudanum, controlling all her activity, even burning her poetry books lest they should make her fanciful and rebellious. It's a dark portrait of the Victorian drive to repress "hysterical" women.

Obviously, this situation can't continue, and Harris drives the story on with the insertion of first a lover for Effy (a risky business — her judgment leaves much to be desired), and then the introduction of a brothel-keeper Fanny Hill and her shadowy, murdered daughter Marta.

Henry's past is slowly revealed, and together the women (never mind that one's dead) plot their revenge. And vengeful they are — Harris might be a romantic at heart, but she's a tough-minded one, and her heroines are only a little less complex and dark than her villains.

As one might expect, this isn't a mature work of fiction. It's uneven, and feels a little like the sketches that Henry leaves lying around in his studio — a hint of the work to come, a bit unformed, carefully, teeteringly constructed. But the plot is strong enough to carry interest through to the end — not great, but good enough to give pleasure to Harris' many fans.

Publisher: Black Swan

Price: $26.95