It's 1937 and Mary Moore has just arrived up to the city. Suddenly her "lightest, prettiest summer frock" seems rather outdated, the grimy boarding house which her parents have picked for her is bound on all sides by rules, and her colleagues at Bensons department store are nothing if not unfriendly. It's not until she spies Harrie Elliott in the boarding house parlour, that her life, and indeed this fascinating first novel, take off.
Harrie is a wearer of pink silk kimonos, a frequenter of mobster dives and a creator of both adventures and her own life history. Mary, who is quickly renamed Em, gets swallowed up by a kind of obsession. Told from the vantage point of Mary's lonely old age, it is the measured manner in which the narrative allows us glimpses of this dangerous fascination that sets Miss Harrie Elliott apart from so much light fiction. With careful, subtle brush strokes, O'Neill constructs a portrait of the burgeoning self-awareness and instinct for destruction of her narrator, Mary, who constantly hints at the disaster of the final chapters but is careful not to own up to any part in it. If the slightly breathy narrative voice owes a debt to Muriel Spark, it doesn't detract from it in the least, while the peculiar lack of place is a positive benefit. The city and its streets are unnamed, leaving the two girls to inhabit their own, slightly claustrophobic world. This is not a fashionable book, but with Miss Harrie El- liott, Irish fiction has gained a distinctive new voice that may well transcend fashion.