The Paying Guests

I love Sarah Waters. Or at least, I love her Victorian novels, Fingersmith remaining one of my all time favourite books: if you haven't read it, why not? Go and do so immediately!  However, I have to admit to giving up on The Night Watch (tedious) and, although I enjoyed The Little Stranger, and thought Waters captured a crisp, haunting atmosphere, it seemed to lack something, some ribbon that would draw it all together as one neat, enclosed package.  But, I loved Fingersmith so much, consider it such a perfect masterpiece, that I am always willing to give a new Waters a go, and bought The Paying Guests without the slightest idea what it was about.  That's trust, no?

The story is set in 1922. Welcome to a middle class suburban London peopled largely by women and the ghosts of the men they lost in the War.  This is the beginning of the Britain we know now, when once well-heeled families, no longer able to afford servants, must do their own housework and shopping, and hang their heads at the shame of it all.  It is an unhappy world, grey, faded, cracking and peeling. Frances and her mother, desperate to hang on to the family house, despite having lost most of the family that once lived in it, take in a lodging couple, the Barbers, who seep into their lives in unexpected ways - although I have to say that if you know anything at all about Sarah Waters, what happens is not that unexpected! And that might be my first criticism: the first two thirds of the book are taken up with nothing more than the 'shocking' revelation that Frances is gay.  Now I accept what Waters is doing here - she takes a glimpse of that twenties Bohemianism, that 'anything goes' attitude of the Bright Young Things, and stuffs into the moral circles of middle class society long before that society is ready even to acknowledge its existence, let alone accept it.  Frances has been forced to give up her girlfriend and now withers, little more than a housekeeper for her mother, who ignores what she knows about her daughter and continues to try and set her up with a 'nice young man'. 

So, that is, as I say, the first two thirds of the book.  The characters are believable, are real, and grow over the expansive time Waters gives them to do so.  Relationships are complicated, and become more so as the book unwinds.  Plot revolves around these people, with little seen of the world beyond the house on Champion Hill at all.  People go out for the day, but we rarely go with them: instead we stay in the house, and begin to feel as hemmed in, as claustrophobic, as Frances herself does.

But this is Sarah Waters, and I kept reading, kept reading, waiting for the twist, waiting for the action to come.

And it does. It comes suddenly, not entirely unexpectedly, but shockingly, nevertheless.  And it is classic Waters.  It is a game changer.  And the book becomes something else.  I couldn't put it down. My mind was running reels.  And I wonder if this is the cleverness, the enjoyment I get from Waters' books, that I am never satisfied that I have the whole, or indeed the real story... I found the end slightly disappointing, a bit wishy-washy - or did I?  Because even when it's all over, I still find myself asking, yes, but did Lilian...?  Could she have..?  Did she...?  

Although I felt the first half of the book could have been shorter, and although the ending did not excite me as much as I would have liked, I still loved this book.  It was easy to read, a real page turner, and thrilling, in places, as only Sarah Waters can be.  It retains touches of the Victorian melodrama that I feel is her true strength, and to which I wish she would one day return, whilst capturing the feel of post-war cynicism: I found the distrust of veterans, begging on street corners, an interesting, and probably accurate, middle class female attitude that sat nicely alongside the more accepted canonising of lost sons and husbands.

I would heartily recommend The Paying Guests, and would go so far as to say it is close to being a return to form of one of Britain's most brilliant writers.

Wake

The adjective most applied in publicity for and reviews of this novel is "timely", which in some ways does it a disservice. It is about the First World War, and so, in this centenary year, is indeed auspicious, but there is a richness to Wake that raises it above the average.

Briefly, it takes place over the 5 days in 1920 when the 'Unknown Warrior' was selected and brought from the battlefields of France to his final resting place in Westminster Abbey. The story follows three women, each touched by the loss of a loved soldier during the war. To say more would be to give too much away.

It is beautifully written, in prose that conjures without inappropriate embellishment: London two years after the war is described as a "post-khaki world".  I found I understood all three characters - they seem to represent three stages of life - without necessarily liking them or even agreeing with their views or behaviour.  The five days are also symbolic: the exhumation of the body as the women confront their issues; the journey of the Unknown Warrior as the women fight their demons and learn new truths; its arrival at Westminster Abbey as those demons are laid to rest. This analogy is not as clunky as my explanation makes it sound, however. The book is a Galaxy chocolate bar, smooth as silk, the storylines winding in and out of each other like funereal ribbons.

I could easily see this as a BBC drama, and if you want to see how it would look, check out the YouTube footage of the procession of the coffin; you can almost see Ada and Ivy laying wreaths at the cenotaph.

Wake is a superb example of its type, an intelligent, interesting, well-written story that rewards the thoughtful reader. Anna Hope could potentially give the likes of Helen Dunmore a run for her money, and I look forward to hearing more from this first timer in the near future.

The Hopkins Manuscript

This isn't my usual kind of book, and I have no idea why I chose it; I was just strangely drawn, I suppose. After all, I bought it from the Persephone shop, so it's not like I just fancied a Persephone and this is all my local Waterstones had... Anyway, buy it I did, and what a happy accident it was.

The Hopkins Manuscript is a 1930s Sci-Fi novel, and tells of an impact between our Earth and its moon. It is, however, so refreshingly different in style to the fast-paced, action-packed, thriller-esque Science Fiction we are offered by today's cinematic experience as to belong to a different genre almost entirely; our hero, for it is written in first person, is an unlikeable middle aged rural chicken breeder, pompous, self-important, and rude. One of the small percentage of people to survive the collision, he sets about the day to day tasks of rebuilding 'normal life', but he and others are scuppered in their desire to simply continue a simple and peaceful existence by the larger machinations of warmongering government.

This book has haunted me since I read it. I cannot look at the moon anymore without thinking of The Hopkins Manuscript. The larger portion of the story is taken up with the build-up to the collision, with the moon's increasingly bulbous monthly appearance in the sky as it nears Earth described in such vivid terms that one does become surrounded by the creepy vacuous winds that accompany its approach, and one starts to see the otherworldly light in which Earth becomes bathed as its monstrous satellite begins to fill the night sky. There is a feeling of helplessness, of the natural horror of the impending destructive power of something so utterly beyond human power to halt.

Despite his selfishness and judgemental attitude, Hopkins becomes a trustworthy ally to us as readers, and dare I say it, we do, I think, warm to him. He is the right guide for a book which shows us the very smallness of our quotidian lives within the bigger picture; The Hopkins Manuscript is a 9/11 novel, in the sense that it makes you consider the life you will have lived in the event of a world-altering catastrophe. It is also, of course, a book still haunted by WW1 and living in the shadow of an approaching WW2 (it was written in 1939), and allegories are not hard to find. It is interesting that the final threat comes from the Islamic world, which adds a prescient nature to the novel, although better informed historians than I may well point instead to inevitability.

This is an alarming and powerful novel, both gentley prosaic and wildly terrifying, and I recommend it unreservedly even if you would never normally go near Science Fiction. It fits perfectly into the Persephone canon, and as both wonderful storytelling and historically significant document, is hard to beat.