The Other Typist is clever, addictive entertainment. Indeed, Rindell pays explicit homage in an epilogue which, like the end of The Good Soldier, features the use of a suddenly produced penknife. Rindell is more interested in evoking Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, with its rambling narrator, copious foreshadowing and tormented concern with the fluid nature of identity. In fact, the similarities are superficial.
She tends towards egoistic impressionism, a habit Rindell has fun with in a scene where Odalie introduces Rose to her arty friends, only for Rose to be appalled by their love of The Waste Land: "If I recall correctly, the poet was called Eliot Something-Or-Another and the poem itself was all a bunch of jibberish, the ravings of an utter lunatic."īritish publication of The Other Typist has been timed to exploit Gatsby mania, and Odalie is certainly a wily gatecrasher of a gilded milieu. Not only are we seeing Odalie through the prism of her obsession, but Rose is writing her account in an asylum under the supervision of a psychiatrist who believes that "telling things in their accurate sequence is good for healing the mind". She even suggests Rose move into the swanky hotel suite Odalie calls home – an offer Rose is thrilled to accept.īy this point Rose's unreliability as a narrator is clear as is the fact that Bad Things are going to happen. Odalie educates Rose in decadence, taking her to speakeasies where drunk flappers play the piano with their feet. Suddenly the pair are inseparable, and we learn that Rose has been in this situation before: she left the nunnery in disgrace after becoming "entangled" with a young novice. Mutual suspicion yields to an all‑consuming friendship when Odalie turns the full beam of her attention on Rose. (This sort of observation – dramatic yet vague – is typical of Rose. The woman was, she concedes, "the dark epicentre of something we didn't quite understand yet, the place where hot and cold mixed dangerously". Rose affects lofty detachment, but can't deny Odalie's impact. "Damned nice girl," says the lieutenant detective. Is she a failed actor? A gangster's plant seeking "the lowdown on the bootlegging racket"? But then a new typist arrives: exotic, immaculately dressed Odalie, her bob a glossy helmet of polished enamel her breezy, alluring manner giving rise to all sorts of rumours. Which suits Rose fine, because she doesn't like many people – not her colleagues in the typing pool and certainly not the "affected" Helen, with whom she shares a room in a drab boarding house. An orphan raised by nuns, she is tolerated for her efficiency rather than liked. Rose Baker is a plain, prudish young typist in a scuzzy police precinct on the Lower East Side.
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