Sarah Waters's novel Fingersmith, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002, was a mad and brilliant thing—a piece of lesbian historical fiction that whipped its history up from the canons of literature (a grubby farmed infant straight out of Oliver Twist is sent hurtling into a gothic thriller that would dizzy even Wilkie Collins) and built its plausibly conflicted same-sex affair out of the familiar intimacies of wealth and servitude. And then there's that massive plot twist. The pleasures of Fingersmith are many: its texture, the grinding suspense, and of course, those guilty, gleeful poachings from 19th-century literary giants. It's thrilling to see well-worn tropes—the den of thieves, the gothic castle, the madhouse—repurposed for still-revolutionary values, such as aligning yourself with the solidarity of girlfriends instead of defaulting to alliances with men. I get jealous when I see people reading Fingersmith for the first time.
Waters took several years to find the structure that best served her pulpy genius. Her debut, Tipping the Velvet, has legions of fans, but it's just a coming-out story, albeit one set against an indelible music-hall backdrop. You can see the shocker coming from miles away in Affinity, which never lives up to the promise of its Victorian spiritualist milieu. They're not bad novels, but they aren't worth much more than the sum of their erotic parts. They're great books to bring on vacation.
The Night Watch is a little downbeat for beach reading, but like Waters's earliest novels, you can sense it working up to something that never quite pays off. Set in a busy World War II London, the story moves a group of disparate Londoners backward in time, from the postwar dust of 1947 to the thick of 1944 to the fresh adventure of 1941, knitting each character to the others as their pasts inevitably collide. It takes a clever writer to decide which clues to plant and which to withhold, and Waters is undisputedly clever. But she relies on easy outs: things and ellipses. In the things column, a pair of silk pajamas and a scuffed ring. She lingers on these trinkets too heavily; they're blinding signposts for the chapters to come. Dots and dashes may swallow up explicit references to the past, but they also undercut her characterizations. It's hard to believe the fraidy-cat homosexual Duncan, in a fit of barroom paranoia, would name his secret shame before breaking off distractedly once Waters drops a blackout curtain ("He couldn't go on").
Still, Duncan ends up one of the most poignant characters, perhaps because the other revelation assigned to him—the specific psychology of his relationship to the "uncle" he lives with—actually should feel like a punch to the stomach. Other figures are appealing, if vague. In a graceful opening chapter, Waters introduces Kay Langrish, an ambulance driver during the war who can't figure out what to do with herself and her money now that it's no longer patriotic to dress in men's clothing (there are shades of Radclyffe Hall's Miss Ogilvy here, but thankfully no resort to Cro-Magnon past lives). Kay stands by the window in her upstairs room, smoking as she watches the cripples and arthritics (including Duncan's uncle) arrive for their appointments with her landlord, a Christian Science healer who will try to murmur their hurts away. The details of her mid-century existence are absorbing, but she never surpasses the stereotype of the woman, lesbian or no, who is made obsolete by the return of men from the front.
Action sequences are similarly uneven. Kay's first ambulance run is jerky and dry, while later (i.e., earlier) rescue efforts are charged with the kind of adrenaline that propelled Fingersmith. Why are some of her passages half-hearted? Maybe Waters's prose is more suited to the fussy kinks of 19th-century sentences. But more likely, she's a writer whose greatest inventions are sparked by contact with other stylists. She's no ventriloquist, as she's worried publicly in interviews, but she's a master at turning genre fiction inside out. The World War II novel isn't a distinct genre, and distinct genres are what catalyze her slash-and-sizzle talent.
Sarah Waters reads on Tues March 28 at Third Place Books (17171 Bothell Way NE, 366-3333) at 7 pm, and on Wed March 29 at Central Library (1000 Fourth Ave, 386-4636) at 7 pm. Both events are free.
annie@thestranger.com
