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Sleep, Pale Sister, Joanne Harris
Black Swan
Reviewed by Sheila Forbes (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)

This is a re-issue of a darkly sensual novel written before Chocolat catapulted Joanne Harris to fame. Set in Victorian times, it is a richly evocative tale told from the viewpoints of the different characters.

Henry Chester is a mediocre artist who sees in nine-year-old Effie the perfect model. As he repeatedly struggles over several years to depict her virginal qualities on canvas he becomes more and more obsessed with her beauty and eventually marries her. In his puritanical determination to mould her to his ideal of childlike innocence he keeps her subdued and obedient with frequent doses of laudanum. But Effie's passionate nature rebels and she takes as a lover the scheming, self-serving Mose Harper.

Mose introduces Effie to Fanny, a brothel keeper whose establishment Henry has visited regularly for many years. Henry sees innocence and purity in Effie but to Mose she is little more than another conquest and, with luck, the way to a financial windfall through blackmail.

To Fanny, however, she is both a substitute for her daughter Marta and a means of avenging that daughter's murder many years before.

Drugged by the laudanum, Effie is drawn into dangerous intrigues and manipulations, while Henry becomes addicted to chloral in his passion for the elusive Marta. To Fanny, Effie is becoming Marta, and it needs only one more step to make the change permanent.

All three are increasingly losing the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Only Mose keeps his feet on the ground and an eye to the main chance, but in the end even he is deluded and cannot avoid the fate revealed in Fanny's Tarot cards.

As in her other books, Joanne Harris excels in conveying atmosphere and evoking the sights, sounds and scents of the places, as well as the conventions of the era. A strange and compelling story, vividly told.