The Confession by Jessie Burton review / An understated triumph

BOOK OF THE DAY

The Confession by Jessie Burton review – an understated triumph

The secret history of a reclusive novelist is revealed in a study of motherhood and creativity by the author of The Miniaturist

Alfred Hickling

Sat 21 Sep 2019 07.30 BST

J

essie Burton’s previous novel featured an artist and her muse; this follow-up concerns a writer and her amanuensis. Constance Holden is a reclusive novelist with a formidable reputation who has published nothing for more than 30 years. Now in her 70s and crippled with osteoarthritis, she employs a young woman called Laura Brown as a housekeeper and secretary. Laura assures her that she’s the patient type. “Then I’ll call you the patient typist,” Constance replies.

Jessie Burton

 

Readers of Burton’s fiction may notice the continuation of a theme, as The Muse similarly began with a young woman being employed as a typist by an inscrutable female art historian. It’s perhaps also worth noting that Burton herself worked as a PA in the City before the publication in 2014 of her million-selling debut, The Miniaturist, so has first-hand experience of supporting herself in a menial role while quietly composing a piece of art.

The Confession also follows The Muse in establishing a dual time-frame. Episodes set in the present day illustrate Constance’s increasing dependency on Laura as she struggles to break her silence with a new book. These passages are interleaved with scenes from the early 1980s when Constance was at the height of her fame, the author of two influential novels and a much-cited essay on female empowerment. Throughout this halcyon period of large advances and Hollywood film offers, Constance’s closest companion was her lover Elise Morceau; a young, waif-like woman she met while walking on Hampstead Heath in north London.

Elise is the novel’s most enigmatic character: a neurotic drifter who both feeds off and resents Constance’s growing celebrity. She becomes increasingly depressed and detached when Constance moves to the US to pursue her ambitions of becoming a player in the movie industry. Then Elise simply disappears, absconding from a filthy Brooklyn apartment leaving a newborn baby behind. The only certain fact is that, immediately prior to her disappearance, Elise received a final visit from Constance.

Burton is a writer fully in control of her craft, as she employs the fundamental co-ordinates of a fairytale

While The Muse was a novel about the creative drive of painters, The Confession is a meditation on fiction and the compulsion to invent alternative realities. Not only does Constance spend much time theorising on the mechanics of her craft, her helpmeet “Laura Brown” is also an act of pure self-invention. From the outset the reader is made aware that “Laura” is really Rose Simmons, the baby abandoned by Elise, who has worked her way into Constance’s confidence in the hope of extracting information from the last person to have seen her mother alive.

Rose/Laura seems to have inherited most of her mother’s insecurities; she works shifts in a coffee shop and is tethered to a hopeless partner whose burrito van business has stalled. Helping Constance not only brings her closer to her mother, it enables the elaborate fabrication of a more fascinating, less flawed version of herself

Though The Confession does not extend as far into the past as her previous books, Burton deploys her characteristically piquant sense of period detail. The Miniaturist was dominated by the image of sugar fermenting in a damp warehouse, creating a cloying sense of 17th-century Amsterdam’s fortunes on the turn. Burton is equally adept at evoking London and Los Angeles on the crest of yuppie decadence: “Women with heavy eyeliner wearing velvet dresses with warrior shoulders, rubbing against tired City boys and men whose long hair flowed from fashionable hats. Denim, leather, nicotine, money – Elise could almost taste them on her tongue like elementals.”

What one notices here, however, is a more free-flowing aspect to her prose, which is plainer and less obstructed by overworked passages than her earlier work. Perhaps this new sense of liberation has been prompted by having produced her first book for children, The Restless Girls; a retelling of the Brothers Grimm fairytale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” with a racy new slant. Like Rose/Laura, the princesses are mourning the loss of a mother, who has been killed in a bizarre racing car accident. Kept under lock and key by an overprotective father, they are ultimately redeemed by the restorative power of storytelling

The Confession perhaps lacks the dramatic thrust of The Muse and The Miniaturist; it is quite a slow build to the revelation promised by the title. But Burton is a writer fully in control of her craft as she employs the fundamental co-ordinates of a fairytale. Overall it stands as another understated triumph for the patient typist.

• The Confession is published by Picador (£16.99). 

THE GUARDIAN