The Ladie Upstairs
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The Ladie Upstairs
By Jessie Elland
Baskerville 2025
Be they ever so courageous, be they ever so brawnful, a new writer cannot saunter onto the novelistic battlefield without sporting their tuition. The Generals and Lieutenants who’ve shaped their learning are usually evident rather early. Jessie Elland’s book The Ladie Upstairs thanks Worsdworth for its tireless obsession with verdant minutiae, it thanks Anne Bronte for its revulsion for all things tumescently sexual, it thanks Dickens for its ingloriously monochrome characters, it thanks Beckett for its love of readerly embogglement. Critical though these comparisons may seem, this story written around the unplaceable Ropner Hall sets a tempo from which Elland can continue, when her strategies are later finessed and her confidence is later assured.
Ann is the inscrutable maid sickened by colleagues’ midnight bonks and poly-gapped jaws of grasping groundsmen. This stately home servant occupies the narrative’s majority. She looks to climb Ropner’s rungs, battling sullied equals and pomaded superiors, hoping to win the allyship of Lady Charlotte and Charlotte's corpulent Aunt. Were she not the least lovable character ever to spring from ink, we might more readily side with this crusading pot-washer. More than an iota of psychomania is conjured when she imagines a male counterpart’s death - “Ann stopped and smiled to herself. It tickled her, that thought; that thought of him being ripped and ragged and torn into shrieking bits.” Then when intimidating men can no longer be blamed for the world’s ills, Ann looms over a weak co-worker. “She didn’t want to look at Rachel anymore. It had suddenly become wildly offensive now to be anywhere near her, to be in proximity to something so weak and meagre.”
What will most perturb during this novel’s opening third is the oleaginous misandry secreted from its every pore. To have a manophobic character is fine when it is a bishop in the writer's higher moral chess move. When it is not instrumental to a character’s later edification however, we are left prostrate from moral vacancy. “Though there were decidedly fewer male servants than female at Ropner,” Elland writes, “Ann felt them everywhere; crawling up the walls, teeming from nooks and crannies, like cockroaches, one always appearing in the place of its stamped-out brother.” This scrofulous hatred is beaten only by “[males] were all faceless at that age, rendered nondescript by their stupidity, by the easy liminality that would soon expire as they grew mean and sharp and grabbing and slobbering and wicked…There was no other way, they never deviated from that narrow path to cruelty, they were all the same.”
The men in The Ladie Upstairs are not allowed exculpation from this haggard stereotype. If Jessie’s name was swapped for John, and the penned hatred was redirected at women, the western world’s hair would be ablaze in feministic indignation. Yet since we have all agreed, in the world of all worlds, that men really ought to be trucked over to rural Poland for statutory execution, this soiled prejudice is both permitted and academically encouraged.
Elland’s stylistic deportment on the page is a more cheering matter. With all a debutante’s fussiness, new writers can be relied upon to tousle and taint their world with hitherto barred effrontery. The fresh allusions come jetting from every paragraph. Have you, compendious reader as you are, ever noticed how the sky often takes on the colour of marmalade? Have you ever cared to notice how, in the right light and at the right temperature, nose bogeys may be seen as nasal bats in a bodily cave? “The blackberry bushes twisting and creaking, sparring with their thorns, the doughy tops of mushrooms pluming from heavy clods of earth, the flowers brave enough for the season sighing,” on and on rolls the horticultural idolatry.
Oddly, Elland’s sentences are at their least effective when she is trying hardest. Rid of any supper-singing desperation, she has ways with words unrivalled. Back we go to the bovine chump Rachel whose “eyes were still staring, still damp, still sympathetic, still citing sisterhood.” One hears Tumbler users engraving such a quote into top right corners as we speak. Having swapped psyches with Lady Charlotte, “Ann turned to the doll on her right. It stared at her raptly, its eternal smile eerie.” Aunts are even described expertly as having a “careening largeness” and “great, bulbous, bathetic mass.” Save some harrowing genius for other scribblers, we shout, luxuriating in this most acerbic of appearances.
Mouth-breathing mortals abandon realism at their peril. Ropner Hall and its habitants (both lazily stateless) do not cohere in the presentation of a believable, smooth story. The author’s predilections for madness make The Ladie Upstairs a jarring, mirthfully obscure hallucinogen. If she can sideline one word sentences (which Bedlamites in the universities do we have to blame for this habit among young writers?) and sterile complexity, Elland has the talent and indeed the backing (this book has been marketed to within an inch of its life) to have cabinets soon glittering with gold praise.
Joe Spivey is a book critic currently residing in Kingston Upon Hull