I came upon the work of Sarah Waters quite accidentally. I was at the Delhi Book Fair and had resolved to only buy authors I hadn’t read or heard of. Reading the pile over the next few weeks, I realised as far as making book choices go, buying one based on the cover image and the flap synopsis was likely to end more often than not in disappointment. And so, when I picked up Waters’ Night Watch, it wasn’t with much hope, but merely a dogged determination to finish. The book starts with Kay — wearing military clothes and sporting her short hair, stepping out into a ‘limp day’. “Don’t you know the war’s over?” men ask her jeeringly. And within two pages you are sucked into the curious life of overt and covert lesbians in post-war England. It was a shockingly good book. With a discovery like that, there is only one thing a reader can do, obsessively buy all the works of the author. Night Watch , I realised, was Waters’ fourth novel, there were three before set in Victorian England and filled with layered protagonists who mostly loved other women. My favourite though is Fingersmith , a book so well plotted that bang in the middle of it, you realise with a gasp that you’ve been had and you have to re-read from the beginning.
All of which is to say that I’d been waiting all year to get my hands on Waters’ sixth and latest, The Paying Guests . Set in London in the 1920s, the book is a tight narrative of the merging of class and sexual mores. Frances, the young protagonist lives with her mother in their grand house in Camberwell. Her father and brothers died in the war, and times are so tough that not only does Frances do all the housework herself, they are even forced to rent out a portion of the house. The book starts on the day the tenants Leonard Barber and his beautiful wife, Lilian, move in.
They are all in equal measure horrified by the proximity with which they have to live their lives and peculiarly fascinated by one another. Frances lies in her room at the end of long days spent cleaning and scrubbing, smoking her cigarette in secret and listening to the sounds of the Barbers chatting, eating their dinner and going down to the lavatory. Being a feminist (who had once thrown a shoe at a police officer) and a lesbian, Frances is curious and critical of the Barbers’ marriage. And this being a Sarah Waters novel, it is only a question of time before she and Lilian manage to fall in love with each other.
Waters flawlessly describes the tribulations and conflicts of being in an “unnatural relationship” at that time through Frances’ own confusions. And while her earlier narratives, like her heroines, have breathlessly raced through edge -of-the-seat plotlines,
Waters is a master of writing about a certain kind of England and effortlessly paints pictures in a perfect sepia tone in your head. Yet, I found myself a bit weary of both Frances and Lilian by the end of the book. As a Sarah Waters fan girl, I see in this book a maturing of an author, a toning down of pace and drama, which makes me curious about what she’ll dish out next.
But if you haven’t read the author before, I’d say start with another book. Fingersmith , in fact, if you have a healthy heart.