It's taken me a while to get around to putting my thoughts about this book in writing, mainly because I'm still not sure what I really think. This is the debut novel of an American author, and somehow it entirely passed me by in the process of becoming everyone else's must-read book of 2010. Fortunately a friend mentioned it to me and sang its praises so highly that I went straight out and bought it. On the whole, I'm glad I did.
I don't think I can describe the book's setting better than the blurb of the Penguin edition: a world "where black maids raise white children, but aren't trusted not to steal the silver."
The Help tells the story of Aibileen, a black maid who has raised sixteen white children, and is currently raising her seventeenth for a white family who won't allow her to use their bathroom in case they catch "black diseases" from her. Her best friend is Minny, who speaks her mind to her employers too freely to avoid being sacked every few months. The narrative is taken up alternately by Aibileen, Minny and Skeeter, a young white woman who, alone amongst her social circle, sees the injustice of a world in which black people are treated as second class citizens.
The driving plot of the novel concerns Skeeter's efforts to write a book exposing the lives of the black "help". Aibileen and Minny, first reluctantly, and then increasingly enthusiastically, tell their stories and encourage other black maids to do the same. The incredible danger that these women put themselves and their families into by even agreeing to meet Skeeter is really well depicted, with Stockett managing to inject some real suspense into some of these scenes.
However, even though Skeeter's story takes up most of the action, for me the real heroine of the book is Aibileen. She is one of the most likeable characters I have encountered in a while, and I found her story heart-breaking. She is currently looking after Mae Mobley, the toddler daughter of a woman who doesn't seem to be particularly interested in her child. Aibileen becomes Mae Mobley's mother figure. She teaches her right from wrong. She teaches her self-worth and self-esteem. She even, at risk of her job, teaches her that the colour of a person's skin matters much less than whether they are a good person. She loves Mae Mobley almost as if she were her own child, and yet the reader senses that, in the end, Aibileen's teachings will be over-ridden by the ingrained values of the white society in which Mae Mobley is being brought up. Like all Aibileen's previous charges, one day Mae Mobley will cease to be "colour-blind" and Aibileen will move on to the next family and the next child.
I loved the way in which Stockett has given all three narrators a really distinctive voice. Aibileen and Minny both speak in the same dialect, but you could flip the book open to any page and know which of the two of them was speaking. I don't know how authentic their dialect is but I was surprised to find how easily I was able to settle into reading it.
The Help tells the story of a world I was unfamiliar with. Occasionally it touches on real people and real events that I recognised but on the whole I knew little and had thought less about what it might be like to be a black person living in the southern United States in the years before the civil rights movement got underway. Stockett is a white author (who, according to her afterword, grew up in a family that employed a black maid) and I really appreciated her attempt to get under the skin of women whose lives she could never have experienced first-hand. On the whole, I thought the characters of Aibileen and Minny were incredibly vivid and in fact, far more convincing than that of Skeeter, a woman whose life experiences must be far closer to Stockett's own.
I did have some issues with the book. I felt that Stockett struggled with the tone she wanted to adopt, tackling some very serious subjects but settling for a light and, at times, humorous style that didn't always gel with her subject matter. She has a habit of broaching the subject of a really shocking event (the most memorable being the beating and blinding of a black man by a group of white men) but pulling back from it just as it all starts to become a bit too serious.
I also felt rather cheated by several of the characters. Her characterisation of the three narrators was so good that I felt that she could have fleshed out some of the other characters rather more. The villain of the piece is Hilly Holbrook, the social centrepiece of the town, who is initally quite an intriguing character but who ends up being so unbelievably horrible that I lost interest in her. The male characters are also, without exception, rather one-dimensional.
I did enjoy
The Help. It was an easy read (perhaps rather too easy, given the subject matter) and introduced me to Aibileen, one of my favourite characters of any book I've read in months. However I felt that Stockett ended the book having only half-finished her job. She could have explored her themes more deeply than she did, and she seemed rather to give up at the end, which I found a little unsatisfying. I wonder whether she will be a bit braver in her next novel, and look forward to reading it to find out.
