putting Clare through school so that both sisters need
not be sacrificed to "business school", and Clare
might have the future Laura was denied. The very day
Laura is married, and the two teenaged girls are
settled at the house of a virtual stranger, Mrs Vaizey
leaves for England to be a lady of leisure with the
remains of the girls' inheritance.
What happens next in the Shaw House is over a
decade of horrifying verbal, physical and
psychological abuse, game playing and random,
colossal cruelty from a vicious and violent drunk.
And we live every moment along with the Vaizey
girls. The first order of business: withdrawing the
carrot of Clare's education, with Clare offloaded to
"business school" just like her sister. It's a blessing
that we're largely spared any "pillow talk" between
Laura and Felix; one of the most revolting male
characters you will likely ever encounter in literary
fiction:
You're too - stupid - to know he's sick in
his guts of being in a house full of women.
Christ! They're not fit for me to vomit on.
That's why. You're just - things.
The Watch Tower is a chilling case in point. Set
during World War Two, the novel reflects what life
for many women in the developed world would be
like now, today, without the advent of feminism. For
that reason, it's a "must read" book. Though at times
you'll want to look at the words through your fingers.
The reader is complicit, throughout the novel, in
the terrible case of developing Stockholm Syndrome
involving two young sisters, Laura Vaizey—brilliant
and in her final years of school—and her younger
sister, Clare, who is only nine when the novel begins.
When their doctor father dies suddenly, their indolent,
useless mother sells their big country home out from
under the girls, withdraws Laura immediately from
high school and "fixes her up" at a Sydney "business
college" so that Laura—like a plough horse—will be
the family's bread winner. Very early on, Laura
realises "There was nothing to be done" and "There
was nothing to dream!"
With a jolt of resignation, the reader sits at the
crest of the roller coaster, waiting to be shoved over
the precipice because Laura's future—"Doctor Laura
Vaizey - Laura Vaizey at Covent Garden"— is
reduced to Laura Vaizey office girl at "Shaw's Box
Factory".
The owner, Felix Shaw, a taciturn, saturnine man
in his mid-forties, takes advantage of the situation by
offering to marry Laura, who is still in her teens.
Laura accepts because Felix dangles the carrot of
James Wood of The New Yorker, in a 2014 analysis
of Harrower’s five full-length novels has noted how:
Harrower’s writing is witty, desolate, truthseeking, and complexly polished. Everything
(except feeling, which is passionately and
directly confessed) is controlled and put under
precise formal pressure. Her sentences, which
have an unsettling candor, launch a curling
assault on the reader, often twisting in
unexpected ways. And although her novels
can feel somewhat closed, and tend to repeat
themselves in theme, her prose is full of
variety. She can be bracingly satirical: “The
piercing soprano she raised at parties was
understood to be her most prized asset, and had
won her much applause.” She is generally tart.
In “The Catherine Wheel,” a novel narrated by
a young Australian woman living in a London
bed-sit, a single glance at the room’s furniture
tells us much about her self-esteem: “Above it
was a mirror, undistorted, except perhaps—I’d
already noticed—on the side of flattery.” She
can be savagely metaphorical: “She was like a
park that had never once removed its Don’t
Walk on the Grass signs.” But her wit often
teeters on the edge of pain…Harrower is an
exceptionally subtle psychologist… [Her] five