Book Review: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

For an orphan girl growing up amid the poverty and criminality of Victorian London’s notorious Lant Street, Susan Trinder has led a remarkably sheltered life, kept safe and protected by her adopted step mother Mrs Sucksby. But when Richard Rivers, or Gentlemen as he is known to them, arrives with a scheme to defraud an heiress of her inheritance, Susan heads out into the world, ready to make her fortune at the expense of the innocent Maud Lilly.

Set in the misty, damp, cold world of mid-nineteenth century England, Fingersmith is a novel that delights in delivering the Victorianna that readers expect. Pickpockets, thieves, great estates that harbour murky secrets, lunatic asylums, all these leitmotifs so familiar from Dickens, Collins, Henry James and the like are delightfully recreated, yet it is to Waters great credit that the classics neither overwhelm nor overshadow Fingersmith. Rather, she uses them as diversions, playing with readers’ expectations, and then subverting them. There are twists here that almost caused my heart to stop. At one point the twist was so unexpectedly decisive that it is impossible to resist the urge to describe the experience as a kind of pleasurable mugging. Sweat beaded on my forehead. It was as though I had downed a few glasses of whiskey, such was the spinning of my head. I had to put down the book and stare at a wall for five minutes, trying to take in the twist.

There are moments in every book that make or break the readers engagement, and there are two here that match or exceed any from the greatest works of literature I have read. The above twist was the first. As a storyteller, there can be few better than Sarah Waters. In the pacing and control of information, she is virtually flawless. Fingersmith manages to be both a page turning romp and a book to enjoy one page at a time. The prose is pleasingly thorough and she inhabits the mind’s of her characters as though they are her own. The characters are horrible at times, and, like the best rogues, that makes them so much more appealing. Indeed, judging from the response of other readers I’ve talked to, Susan must be one of the most popular characters anywhere in literature.

The second moment that made my engagement comes at the end. It is a quiet transformation, not dramatic in a heart-stopping way, but gently seductive. I won’t give away any details of it, other than to say that it provided a pleasingly open ending to what had appeared before then a pretty straight-forward feminist perspective on erotica.

Fingersmith provides a rewarding and utterly compelling reading experience. There is something ceaselessly refreshing and appealing about lesbian romance. I think it is in the general absence of cultural power inequalities that sometimes overwhelm heterosexual romances. This is the first Sarah Waters novel I have read, but it won’t be the last.  She is a superb writer who matches character, form, style, themes and content in one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I have had in a long time.


9 out of 10

Fingersmith was first published by Virago in 2002. The edition pictured here is the current Virago paperback, published 2003, ISBN 9781860498831, 548pp.

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Read: May 2009

I seem to spend a lot of my time praising novels for aspects like their ingenuity, their intelligence, their sheer descriptive prowess. And these are all important qualities in a book. But what I like best is a good story. A good story which surrounds me so completely that the action becomes more vivid than the physical world around me. I like to be inundated by the words in such an immediate sense that I feel their breeze against my skin and believe that I am an unseen ghostly presence hovering somewhere between the full stop and the start of the next sentence.

What I like about each of the Bronte novels I have read so far – Jane Eyre and now Wuthering Heights – is that they are just this: stories. And proper thick as warm porridge drenched in honey stories too. Stories to listen to enraptured around a camp fire, stories to read huddled with a torch under the duvet at 3am because you cannot sleep for thinking about what is going to happen next. Everything that is great about each of them lies in the quality of the story, in the beguiling narrative and engaging characters. It seems to me that cut off as they were from the literary milieu of London the Bronte's wrote stories to entertain themselves rather than demonstrate their worth as writers, wild flights of fancy as adventurous and exciting as any Don Quixote type epic adventure could ever be.

Wuthering Heights is the story of two deeply flawed individuals, Catherine and Heathcliff, of their mutual obsession and the destruction it wreaks upon all who know them. I don't know who it was that first advanced the idea of theirs being a great love story but I doubt they had ever actually read the book. And if they had, and this is their idea of love, then I am glad I wasn't anywhere near them. The story of Catherine and Heathcliff is one of two wilful people who seem unable either to live either with or without each other. As Cathy explains early on, "...he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same...I AM Heathcliff." They love and hate each other as they do themselves. At times they can barely stand to be together and at others they claw and scratch at each other as though trying to find a way to actually open up their bodies and climb inside each other. I think Kate Bush captures this odd relationship best:

“Out on the wily, windy moors
Wed roll and fall in green.
You had a temper like my jealousy:
Too hot, too greedy.
How could you leave me,
When I needed to possess you?
I hated you. I loved you, too.”

Wuthering Heights is a brooding psychological obsession/revenge/ghost story set against the domineering backdrop of the North York Moors. Plot, setting, and characters all have a sense of windswept wilderness to them. Heathcliff is the sort of libertine-esque highwayman who does what he likes in life knowing that no-one is going to stop him. The cold and calculating manner in which he enacts his vengeance makes for disturbing and uncomfortable reading. He is the bad man who gets away with it without remorse or shame. This lack of moral ambiguity makes him an enthralling character. And in her own histrionic, selfish, and spoiled way Catherine is just as bad. Wuthering Heights is the book I always wanted to read as a child, where roles are reversed and events don't follow the usual pattern of stories. The baddies not only capture the hero, but hang him mercilessly before escaping to hatch their next dastardly plan.

Emily Bronte doesn't care whether the reader likes her characters or not, makes no effort to justify or smooth their actions. The tale is merely placed on paper and left for the reader to make of it what they will. It is a masterpiece of controlled atmospheric storytelling and caustic characterisation. It is a wonderful read which I highly recommend to everyone.

9 out of 10

(There are many great reviews of Wuthering Heights out there. One of my favourites can be found here.)

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

What makes a great novel? Is it beautiful, lyrical, prose written with an intrinsic kind of poetry? Is it the pace of the plot which drags you along by the nape of your neck forcing you to turn page after page long into the night? Conventional wisdom will tell you that the perfect novel lies somewhere between these two, and there is no doubt that Jane Eyre superbly achieves each of these requisites. But, to my mind, there is something else that makes a book great: the narrative voice. A great narrative voice which reads like it is whispering solely to you and takes you into its confidence so that the world comes alive and real before you, is the most important thing in literature. It does not matter if a book has very little plot, such as with Mick Jackson’s The Underground Man, or Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, or Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Nor does it matter if the language is not beautiful, as in Hemingway, or Philip K. Dick. Because if the narrator keeps you close and unfolds their world to you so clearly that you see and feel and smell exactly what they see and feel and smell, then there is an intimacy far closer than you find in everyday life.

And the point of this? Not only is Jane Eyre well written, with mystery and intrigue to burn, but in its eponymous narrator, it has one of the most enthralling voices I have encountered. You don’t just get inside her mind, you actually begin to feel that your mind is as one with hers. She is wilful, stubborn, independent, lovable, intelligent, naïve, craving and so much else besides. She is neither proud, nor a walkover, and takes the rough with the smooth without seeming to differentiate between the two. Throughout the first half of this novel you cross every bone in your body that she will find love and happiness, and when she does your disbelief is matched by hers. When things turn sour you share her resigned certainty that it was always going to end out like that. And when she finds a quite existence for herself, you settle in, feeling relieved that things worked out well for her. But hope cannot be extinguished, not while Mr. Rochester is out there and great love is still possible…

I love Jane Eyre, I was hooked from about page 3. The prose is uncluttered beyond belief; reading Jane Eyre feels like reading the English language as it was invented to be read: simple, fantastically evocative, and with an internal rhythm all of its own. And the twists and turns of (sometimes outrageous) fortune keep you guessing, because Charlotte Bronte is too talented to give any hint as to how it will all end. You get the impression that she would just as easily kill off Jane in a wild snowstorm as bestow her heart’s desire. It is in this uncertainty that the mystery lies.

Jane Eyre is one of those books in which the progression of one word after another is all the pleasure you need. It is soothing and gentle so that I could happily read it every day for the rest of my life. And I am confident that there would always be something remarkable to discover, because this is a remarkable book. Read it now.

10 out of 10