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.

Book Review: Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge

Read: July 2010

Master Georgie in one tweet-sized chunk:
Short and apparently simple, Master Georgie is an enjoyable snapshot of lives and the Crimean War.

It is a rare delight to encounter a book of such apparent simplicity as Master Georgie. The narration – split between three voices – is compelling and smooth, the prose wonderfully uncluttered. It is overloaded neither with explicit themes or complicated ideas. There is no sense of a writer trying to be clever. Master Georgie is storytelling of the finest order.

And yet I use the phrase ‘apparent simplicity’ advisedly, for the simplicity of style masks a cunningly composed narrative which questions how one can ever know something simply by looking at it. In Master Georgie, Beryl Bainbridge confronts the reader with an oddly compelling statement: you cannot know these characters.

When war breaks out in the Crimea George Hardy, surgeon and photographer, sets off to provide whatever services he can offer in support of the British effort. With him travel his adoptive sister Myrtle, amateur geologist Dr Potter and photographer’s assistant and fire-eater Pompey Jones. The narration is split between them, starting in the cold back streets of 19th century Liverpool, travelling through sweltering Constantinople and on to the battlefields of the Crimea. As each seeks to shed light on Master Georgie (as Myrtle terms him) a picture begins to develop of everyone but him. He remains the dark spot on the plate.

The Crimean War was the first to be extensively documented by photography and one gets the impression that Bainbridge spent a great deal of time searching for inspiration for her characters by looking at these pictures, only to come up with more questions than answers. That is how the book reads: a snapshot of a long dead, anonymous person who can never be resurrected, not even through literature. Master Georgie is all about what lurks beneath the surface of a photograph: the context, facets of themselves people choose to hide from the world, the misinterpretations that people ascribe to surface images. At one point a fellow character enquires as to why Myrtle often looks sad. “It’s the way I am on the outside”, she replies. “Inside, I assure you I’m quite happy.” This seems to sum up Master Georgie nicely.

There is an element of satire here, too. There are two targets for this: specifically the bombast of Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ and generally those who gallantly march off at the first hint of war assuming victory. It reminded me very much of The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell with its portrayal of out of place Britishness, a pompous sense of worth that is never fully punctured, even while confronted by death, disease and defeat. There are some absurdly funny moments. The wealthy British bring trunk -loads of possessions and are accompanied as far as the Constantinople by their spouses and children as though for a bit of a summer jaunt. There is a funny scene when, having arrived in Constantinople, they go to the opera only for it to descend into a brawl over a perceived indiscretion towards Myrtle.

The satire is not biting though, and surrounding it is a tender portrayal of life, war and the consequences of our actions. Like the best war books, one comes away feeling that it was all so bloody pointless.

Yet none of this is to say that Master Georgie is an easy book. It is slippery, never quite giving the reader what one wants or expects. The drama is quiet, unassuming. Some of the supposedly dramatic aspects – particularly the shared and mysterious guilt the synopsis promises – didn’t really resonate with me at all. The prime feeling I came away with was puzzlement: I knew I had enjoyed the prose and the journey without really engaging with any of the characters; without being able to identify why. Others I know have reacted to it with utter indifference. Yet the fact remains that I enjoyed reading it, and it continues to challenge and interest me a month later. This was my first Beryl Bainbridge novel but I’m certainly going to read more by her in the coming months.

7 out of 10

Abacus, 1998, 9780349111698, 212pp

Further Reviews:
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Book Review: The Underground Man - Mick Jackson

To celebrate the 200^th review on Books, Time, and Silence, I will be re-posting 10 of my favourite reviews. 

As day 5 ticks into day 6 I revisit one of the most charming books I have had the pleasure to read: Underground Man by Mick Jackson.

Read: June 2008

The Underground Man in one tweet-sized chunk

A book to fall in love with and remind you how great literature can be.

"As a young man I imagined growing old would be something like the feeling one has at the close of a long and satisfying day: a not unpleasant lassitude, always remedied by a good night’s sleep. But I now know it to be the gradual revelation of one’s body as nothing more than a bag of unshakeable aches. Old age is but the reduced capacity of a failing machine. Even my sleep – that beautiful oblivion always relied upon for replenishment – now seems to founder, has somehow lost its step. My fingers and toes are cold the whole year round, as if my fire is slowly going out."

The Underground Man is one of those uncomplicated, absolutely charming novels which you wish you could read all the time. Mick Jackson writes with the brevity and technical acumen of a literary master like J.M. Coetzee, and the warm-hearted sensitivity of a loved childhood author such as Michael Morpurgo. It is an absolutely fantastic novel.

An old, reclusive Duke has just completed the construction of a series of tunnels under his vast estate. For what purpose, he is not entirely sure. Probably because he has never felt entirely comfortable around people. He is inordinately wealthy but getting on in years, without an heir to take over the estate when he passes. Many of the staff he has lived with throughout his life are beginning to get a little old as well. It is all rather depressing. And yet his imagination appears to know no bounds. As he searches for an explanation for the malaise that seems to be engulfing him he begins to retreat further and further underground, into the heart of his family estate, and the memories which dwell there. A strange young boy seems to be floating around him, and there are memories which demand to be noticed.
 

Loosly based on the life of the 5th Duke of Portland, William Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck who really did build a network of tunnels under his estate, Jackson brings the Duke's eccentric mind dazzlingly to life. He ponders how apple trees work, whether his insides are colour-coded, what happens to all the huge whale bones at the bottom of the ocean. He is lovable, thoroughly original and oh so sympathetic. One can't help but love him. Indeed, I can’t think of a character I have wanted to take under my wing and care for more than the Duke.

There is virtually no plot, just the delightfully eccentric and amusing mind of the Duke, as he dallies through life and slowly descends into madness. I've never met anyone who has anything bad to say about this book. It is one of the best Booker shortlisted books I have ever read. I simply cannot recommend it highly enough.

9 out of 10

Review: The Lost Dog - Michele de Kretser

Read: August 2008

The Lost Dog provides one of the best lessons in writing one could hope to find. If there is ever a book you can hand to a creative writing student and say: “this is what happens when you try to be profound at the expense of writing a story. This is what happens when you let florid, pretentious prose marry complex plot lines without thought to what the reader wants to read.” If there is one lesson to learn from this book it is this: less is most definitely more. As G.K. Chesterton so wisely put it: “Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.”

Tom Loxley is a childless divorcee, an insipid, self-absorbed scholar trying to finish his book on Henry James. And when his dog goes missing, he is plunged into a quandary of self analysis which leads to lots of grand sounding thoughts and few real self-discoveries. His mother is growing old and infirm, and he must confront the steady march of time. It is all very clichéd. I hate it when people criticise the ‘literary’ novel, but reading this book I can see why they do. I like books where not much happens, where there is a meditation on life and art and other metaphysical concepts, but this is just boring. 

Having lost his dog, Tom is cast back seven months, to reminisce upon the time when he walked into an art gallery and met the mysterious artist, Nelly Zhang. Soon he is visiting Nelly in her ramshackle warehouse home-come-studio, and becoming increasingly fascinated with both Nelly, and her art. The two fall in love and, fast forward seven months, search wildly for the eponymous lost dog. Confused? So was I. Especially since, interspersed with these two plots, there are many others. There is Tom’s bland childhood in India; the unremarkable search for said dog; a mystery surrounding the end of Nelly’s marriage; the invincible march of old-age upon Tom’s octogenarian mother; an investigation into the connections between art and life. The Lost Dog reads like an over-knotted shoelace; just when you think you are about to get into one of the plots, you find it densely tangled in another. And with the possible exception of the mystery surrounding Nelly’s marriage (which occasionally threatens to develop into a full-blown story but is repeatedly tugged back into the mundanity of the other plots) none of these seems to lead anywhere. The knot is impenetrable.

This is a book which is complex for complexities sake, over-written for the sake of pretension. Tom doesn’t go shopping, he strolls “along packed aisles” marvelling “at the ease with which articles changed status, transmuted by the alchemy of desire.” In a garden he encounters box hedges that contain “the kind of roses whose icy perfection was impervious to common rain.” When he sees sodden fields, they resemble “a bitch who has whelped too often.”

At one point, de Kretser has Tom ruminate that: “What he missed in images…was the passage of time. ‘Stories are about time. But looking’s a present-tense activity. We live in an age where everything’s got to be now, because consumerism’s based on change. Images seem complicit with that somehow.”

How odd then that The Lost Dog seems to have absolutely no consistent sense of either plot development, or time. Perhaps that is the point: that art and stories are different beasts. If so, this is a perfect demonstration of that. Even though the chapters are split into days of the week, there is no linear plot whatsoever. Because of the shifting time of the various plots, it isn’t even clear when Tom is searching for the dog, and when other things in his life are happening. I was about halfway through when I realised there was a seven month shift in time between some of the events. And in the past the dog is barely mentioned and clearly not a cornerstone of his life.

And this is the biggest problem: the dog is not a character in itself, but rather a literary metaphor. It is this which I found most frustrating. How are we supposed to sympathise with the loss of Tom’s dog when it doesn’t even have a name? The absent canine is referred to simply as “the dog.” Tom professes to suffer greatly from the dogs disappearance, but he doesn’t seem to have developed any sort of relationship with the dog before this. In his eyes, it isn’t even worthy of a name.

I could write for hours on what I found annoying in The Lost Dog, but Sam Jordison, writing for the Guardian’s Booker Prize blog, sums it up well:

“There are more annoyances. First: an overuse of colons. Coupled with incredibly short sentences. Full of portent. But signifying what? Nothing.
Sometimes: the problem is compounded in painfully short paragraphs.
Sometimes: another crime. Certain words are clumsily – painfully – repeated and twisted all up into oddly ungrammatical sentences.”

At one point Tom refers to his youth as “odorous, unhygienic and refusing to be disposed of with decent haste.” He need not limit himself to his youth, his pseudo middle-age crisis, in my mind, cannot be disposed of with decent haste either.

It is not all bad. There are some wonderful observations. At one point Nelly argues “doesn’t setting out to reject the past guarantee you’ll never be free of it? It’s like being modern means walking with a built-in limp.’” But these are lost amid the knot of confusion and banality. 

A.S. Byatt has written that, “whatever the literary equivalent of perfect pitch it, Michele de Kretser has it.” On this evidence she performs month long operatic works, and it is too tiring to sit and listen.