In ‘The Secrets She Keeps,’ John, the impressionable narrator, is mysteriously summoned to the palatial home of Misty Moore, an actress of dubious origins who needs a nanny to look after her two-week old daughter, Jewels, and Mouse, the son of her ex-lover. While waiting for an interview with the actress, John meets the beautiful eighteen-year-old Hepsie Vine, whom he assumes is the ex-nanny, and Brian, Misty Moore’s stylist. He becomes instantly captivated by Hepsie’s beauty. John, whose experience is limited to the preparation of baguettes at an exclusive sandwich bar, has no idea why he is being offered the post of nanny, but is so taken by Miss Moore (or, more specifically, by her gargantuan breasts) that he agrees to move to Yorkshire with her for six months and look after the children. It is there, in a dilapidated, rambling manor house that nineteen-year-old John finds himself embroiled in a mystery that not only involves Misty Moore and Hepsie Vine, but also Hepsie’s eccentric all-female clan, consisting of her grandmother, mother and five sisters.

Cross’s plot is an intriguing one, particularly as John’s obviously naïve and often slow-witted assessment of events puts him at odds with the reader. He is so overwhelmed by his duties as nanny and so fascinated by the opulence and splendour of Miss Moore’s lifestyle that his view of reality is significantly skewed. In an ironic twist, Mouse, his disturbed and temperamental charge, who wanders around balaclava-clad and medicated, has a clearer grip on reality than the ‘Mummyman’ does. The seven-year-old’s wry comments and sharp incisive analyses provide the reader with the balance so obviously lacking in John’s account of things. The reader, as a consequence, arrives at the truth much earlier than the misguided narrator does.

More extraordinary than the story, however, is Cross’s narrative style, which is characterized by a lyricism that is, at its best, vividly descriptive and at its worst, frenzied. Phrases like “Twinkles of fairy sapphire danced over his face” might be a little over the top for some, but Cross often conveys sensual experience with a startling immediacy:

“That her hair was blue-black as the last blaze of midnight. It had such a sheer sheen, a deep, almost purple, gloss, that it reminds me still, to this day, of a freshly rubbed plum. So fresh that if I’d, and oh I do so wish I had, dared lean towards her and stroke my trembling fingers though her curls, I’d’ve come away with hands dripping with a permanent inky blue.”

The lyricism isn’t gratuitous. At a structural level, it creates an element of phantasmagoria that is essential to the plot. When John visits Misty Moore’s London mansion for the first time, he literally enters another dimension, that of the rich and famous. His drive to Wychwood with the children and his supposedly accidental meeting with Misty Moore on the way set the scene for a curious tale full of unbelievable happenings and bizarre characters. As the story progresses, the world of the novel becomes more and more surreal till, in the end, it feels as if you’re looking at the grossly distorted images of a fairground’s hall of mirrors.

Mirrors, which abound in Misty Moore’s Yorkshire mansion, underscore one of the novel’s central themes, that appearances can be deceiving. The naïve John is enraptured with the world of glamour and fame that Misty Moore represents, not realizing that despite her money – or perhaps because of it – she is terribly unhappy. She uses her make-up and clothes, her elaborate lies about dancing with the Bolshoi, and her breast implants to hide the essential emptiness of her life. In stark contrast to her, the Vines, though impoverished, love each other fiercely and represent all that is wholesome and normal. Hepsie, who wants a career in the media, eventually has to choose between these two competing ways of life.

Although ‘The Secrets She Keeps’ may or may not win the critical/popular acclaim of its predecessor, it is an intriguing novel that deals innovatively with modern themes, particularly the obsession with celebrity lifestyles and famous people. A modern fairytale with elements of the gothic, the novel’s rather protracted end ultimately affirms the traditional triumph of love over greed.

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Shahbano Bilgrami is a freelance writer and copy editor who lives in Morgantown, West Virginia. Aside from being a regular book and film reviewer, she has had poetry published in An Anthology (OUP 1997) and has authored/contributed to several children’s textbooks during her eight-year period as editor at Oxford University Press, Pakistan. She is currently working on her first novel.

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© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.