Nursery crimes
The perfect nanny is at the centre of Leïla Slimani’s chilling morality tale.
‘ The baby is dead” is the first line of Leïla Slimani’s terrifically creepy LULLABY (Faber & Faber, $33). On page three, we learn that a little girl is dead, too. She put up a fight, but she died anyway. We know who the victims are and who the killer is. The killer is the singer of lullabies, the nanny. She had been the perfect nanny, with impeccable references. She doesn’t just nanny, but cooks and cleans and organises lives. The young French couple, the parents, Myriam and Paul, are professionals, she a lawyer, he a music producer. They are clever and ambitious and not very nice.
Louise, the nanny, remains unknown; they are not interested in knowing her. And what is there to know? She has no life outside the children, who are not hers, and the home, which is not hers. If she does have another life, an alter ego, they are not interested. She lives to serve. Paul comes to dislike her. She is too perfect, which exposes his and Myriam’s imperfections. But she is the perfect nanny and that is all they care about.
Slimani’s slender, chilling book is a morality tale of sorts. It is a warning against indifference; having a lack of curiosity can be dangerous. The nanny does have a story that will slowly be revealed and unravelled as Louise, too, unravels along the way to the inevitable tragedy.
Juliette and Nate, a pilot and a receptionist, fell in love and were destined to live happily ever after. He was handsome and rich; she was beautiful and not rich. She moved in and dreamt of babies and nice houses and happiness after a not-veryhappy childhood. Then Nate called it off. Oh, he was nice enough about it. He paid for a flat, not a terribly nice flat, but a flat, and all he asked was that she give him space. Big mistake.
THE PERFECT GIRLFRIEND (Wildfire, $55), by Karen Hamilton, is the modern-day tale of a woman scorned who is also a complete nutter and who will go to incredible lengths to get her man back. The plotting of this is excellent and quite bonkers, especially as Juliette doesn’t even like Nate – he’s pompous and condescending, an entitled rich boy – but then neither do we. In fact, there is nobody likeable in this book, which makes it easier to like: they all deserve what they get and what they get is every dumped person’s wildest dreams of revenge. Twenty years before Eddie became an alcoholic, now teaching at his old school in a small English town, he was just a normal kid hanging out with his mates in their little gang. There was Fat Gav, Metal Mickey, Hoppo and a token girl, Nicky. They spent much of their time hiding from another gang with mean older boys. The younger boys communicate using chalk-stick figures. They leave cryptic messages for each other to indicate secret meeting places and times. Hence the title of CJ Tudor’s first murder mystery, THE CHALK MAN (Penguin, $37).
The boys discover a murdered girl’s body, which leads to a series of strange events and tragedies that alter the lives of the little gang then and into adulthood. A good, solid debut, with well-drawn characters, that nicely captures the tensions between family lives and the interior lives of teenagers.
We know who the victims are and who the killer is. The killer is the singer of lullabies, the nanny.