Artists Passion

The practice of art requires time. Much like the art we create it is about growth.

I felt sad, on completing Jane Harris’ new novel, The Observations. I was also enlivened.
I had lived the last month with the main character, Bessie, whose story, set in 1863 England, drew me in from the first word. I purchased my copy of the book at Shakespeare & Co. Bookstore in Paris, France an hour or so after I had read to an audience of 20 or more from my collection of short stories, “Keeper of Secrets…Translations of an Incident.”

The Observations is a great novel and I highly recommend it, particularly to anyone who has a penchant, like me, for Victorian England. But the book is more than a period piece. Like it’s title, The Observations, the story in and of itself is a meditation on observing not just those around us, but ourselves. The voice of Bessie, the domestic, of a woman named, Arabella Reid, directs us through Bessie’s past with Arabella, shows how she came to meet Arabella and the circumstances that brought the two to where are now. You have to read to the end to learn this. But this is not what kept me committed to the story.

The Observations is well written, suspenseful and downright magnetic, and is every bit story as it is explanation–the latter seamlessly embedded in the former. Yet it is the experience of observing Bessie witness and recollect herself during and because of her times with Arabella that inspires the reader to peer more deeply into one’s own self –through not simply the eyes of another, but rather one’s relationship with another—that makes Harris’ The Observations so unique. The Observations is quite simply a novel of observance—both internal and external for the two are indelibly bound.

Bessie’s relationship with the beautiful Arabella is like a painting, a work of art, and the path of whose development the reader can never be sure. Uncertainty is a major character alongside Bessie. And it is this uncertainty, this unknowing, if you will that casts not only a pall, but also a glow over the narrative.

During my stay in Europe and London, I read The Observations, steadily devoting an hour before bedtime. Prior to starting it book I completed another novel that I had begun in Washington while waiting to board my flight to Paris. This first novel, set in Edwardian England was an excellent and thoroughly enjoyable read. But The Observations, at just over 400 pages, was a different work. It required more–asked patience of me—patience toward Jane Harris the writer in telling Bessie’s story, hearing what Bessie had to say—and patience also with myself in reading The Observations.