What Book to Read?

If I asked you to name a book that is set in nineteenth century England and features a young man hired by a rich eccentric to mount his collection of prints, and who teaches the man’s niece to draw, I’d have a fair idea what you’d say. And if I added that there was a fortune hunting scoundrel and a mad house in the story, you’d be certain I was talking about Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. But there is another, equally correct answer: Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters (2002). 

In this story, Sarah Waters consciously dips into a recognisable pool of Victorian literary conventions. As well as those above, there is the confusion over identities, the missing heir, the kind-hearted but criminal mother figure – a baby farmer with the Dickensian name of Mrs Sucksby – and the scholar whose intellectual labour is sterile, like Dr Casaubon’s. But Waters is not content to borrow; in her hands each of these is refigured into something new, surprising, and often nasty. She looks beneath the surface at what life might really have been like – for example, in a mad house, or in the poor quarters of London. ‘Step to the window,’ says one character, ‘look into the street. There is life, not fiction. It is hard, it is wretched’. But of course it is fiction. Furthermore, the manner in which the story is presented plays with the way that personal narrative is, of its nature, fiction. Nothing is as it seems; nearly all the characters are ‘clinging to fictions and supposing them truths’. As one of them says, ‘When I try now to sort out who knew what and who knew nothing, who knew everything and who was a fraud, I have to stop and give it up, it makes my head spin’. Indeed.

The story is told in three parts. The first and the last are recounted by a young woman, whose name ‘in those days’, was Susan Trinder. She has been brought up by Mrs Sucksby in Lant Street, the Borough, London, then a den of thieves (now close to Little Dorrit Park and the Charles Dickens Primary School). ‘We were all more or less thieves at Lant Street. But we were that kind of thief that rather eased the dodgy deed along, than did it’, being baby farmers and receivers of stolen goods. So when Richard Rivers, who was born a gentleman but now lives by ‘thievery and dodging’, proposes a scheme whereby Sue will help him seduce a sheltered girl for the sake of her fortune, she goes along with it. In the first section of the book, Sue tells what then happened.

The second section is told in the present tense by the girl in question, Maud Lilly, who gives her version of the same events. And remember, nothing is as it seems. The third section reverts to Sue’s account of how the mystery was resolved. The plot is complex, clever, dark and ultimately very satisfying. It is also a love story.

Waters has a wonderful ear for language and the nuances of the spoken word – often more a gulf than a gradation – between the classes in nineteenth century England. For example, the Lant Street crowd call Rivers ‘Gentleman’ – that is Ge’mun, ‘as if the word were a fish and we had filleted it’. At one point Maud says ‘I can’t imagine  … that you mean me any kind of good, since you persist in keeping me here, when I so clearly wish to leave’. And Mrs Sucksby says admiringly ‘Hear the grammar in that’. It’s not just in conversation; Sue’s and Maud’s accounts are quite different. Both sound ‘Victorian’, a result all the more remarkable because it is achieved without recourse ‘thieves’ cant’ by the ‘low’ characters. I am always impressed by writers who can pull off the difficult feat of differentiation, and Waters excels at it.  

Others have also been impressed by this book. It was shortlisted for both the Man Booker and the Orange Prize, and won the CWA Ellis Peters Prize for Historical Crime Fiction. It is another of those books that deals with crime, but defies categorisation as part of the crime genre – just as does The Woman in White.

Some readers may have recently seen an adaption for TV of Waters’s novel The Night Watch (2006), set during the Blitz.  I gather there is a TV version of Fingersmith, too. You can also read my post on Waters’s most recent book, The Little Stranger (2009). And for good measure The Woman in White post is here.

You can read more about Sarah Waters here.