Lauren Mooney’s service reviews – the most current issue | Books

There are, MR James tells us, five qualities that must meet the best ghost story: pretense of truth, “pleasant danger”, no mechanical explanation, no scary scares, and that the story belongs to the “day” of the writer (and reader). In Lauren Mooney’s classic novel, Danielle lives a precarious life as a PA at an arts support group called Hodgepodge (link: “to the mind”). She writes e-mails, makes tea and is usually running errands to her evil boss Jeannie. Jeannie doesn’t seem to see the difference between working for a charity, and working he.

After a bitter divorce, Danielle finds herself unexpectedly homeless. With no money, no bank of Mom and Dad, and no room in her paycheck, she pays to live alone in Jeannie’s parents’ house, a noisy heap among us. Jeannie said: “We could do with someone else to take care of the place. “You’re doing us a really good job.”

Westerley has a well-known name: Shirley Jackson’s Hill house or Susan Hill Eel Marsh Housewith their dust-covered rooms and locked doors without keys. All in Westerley, of course, is not as it seems: Danielle, alone in the house and miles from anywhere, gets a fresh plate of peaches on the side; he sees a face in the window; they wake up to find themselves somewhere else – or elsewhen – the rest. He hears hobnailed shoes on the stairs; she finds herself reaching for a calico apron that doesn’t exist.

At first Danielle sleeps in the bedroom, but when Jeannie unexpectedly arrives – trailing her equally mischievous son, Edward – she heads to the servants’ quarters. Before long, Danielle is up at dawn, cleaning Jeannie and Edward, bringing afternoon tea to the drawing room. As the past and present blur, so do the lines between the 21st century servant and the 19th century maid. Didn’t they always bring Jeannie green tea to the office? And didn’t Jeannie ask him to “take care of the place”?

The service is a contemporary novel: about the housing crisis, the precariousness of professional life without family support, broken phones and bad wifi. However, the time of Mooney’s book makes it clear how certain things are eternal: loneliness, poverty, desires, the feeling of suffering for someone, for something, for no other reason than your birth, the carelessness that one must follow between self-respect and self-disrespect, trying to remain self-conscious in the face of a world that believes in you – to be inferior or not.

In an attempt to seduce her with weapons to beat her up close, the grumpy Edward announces that he’s Upstairs, Wooster and, er, Downton, while Danielle is Downstairs, Jeeves, and … Abbey. “It’s a joke, Jesus, you work for my mother, so you’re a staff?” joke.” Alone in the drawing room with the young mistress of the house, Danielle – or, perhaps, her magical partner – does not know what to do, or run away.

The fun of the Service is very interesting. And yet what is also interesting is the real world in which many Danielles lived. How many Edwards, for how many years, did their “seductions” with no results? How many poor girls have suffered so much because of the threat of homelessness and poverty? The book, in places, can feel overwhelming. Mooney must have trusted his readers too much – or, perhaps, his writing. The careful removal of the class system stands on its own. So, the case that drives this book is how little has changed in over 100 years. Or, perhaps, how little has changed.