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THE PAYING GUESTS
by Sarah Waters
McClelland & Stewart, September 2014
576 pages
$34.00 CAD
ISBN: 0771089414


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

To look at Frances Wray as this novel opens, one would never imagine that this young woman had an ounce of rebellion in her. Her hair pinned up in an untidy knot, her hands rubbed raw from the heavy housework associated with a large, unmodernized house in London just after the Great War, Frances appears to be the very emblem of a pre-war female identity - the dutiful spinster daughter, devoted to her widowed mother and doing what she can to maintain the pretense of middle-class respectability on an inadequate income.

But appearances are deceiving. Frances once threw a shoe at a member of Parliament in a suffrage demonstration. She had a passionate affair with a young woman and has long recognized her attraction to women, a fact with which she is entirely comfortable. She smokes cigarettes she rolls herself, for reasons of economy. She certainly tries to spare her mother's feelings, but she is still fully in touch with her own.

The time is 1922 and the war has been over for less than four years. Like so many others, the Wray family has suffered deep losses. Both of Frances' brothers were killed, one early on, the younger later. Frances was a convinced pacifist as was her brother, who was essentially bullied into the services after his brother died. The losses diminished her mother who, now in her early fifties seems much older, and perhaps killed her father, who turned out to be far less than met the eye. He left debts and little in the way of an estate, so now the surviving women have to shift themselves to keep on going.

They convert part of their large "gentleman's house" to an apartment and rent it out to the Barbers, a young married couple. The pair represent a new, post-war phenomenon, a class that is abruptly rising into the middle-class. Leonard Barber, nervously energetic, is a clerk in an insurance company where he is an "assessor of lives," determining whether the life to be insured is good, bad or indifferent. In any but the most literal way, Leonard is appallingly ill-equipped for the task.

His wife, Lilian, is a different matter. She has an artistic bent, one which she expresses by over-decorating her new rooms. She is a clever seamstress and caught in the conventions of marriage of the period, which demand she stay home and "keep house" for her husband. She is also supposed to have children, but an accidental pregnancy that ended in a miscarriage was what got her into her marriage in the first place and she really wants nothing more to do with having babies.

It is extremely difficult to write further about this book without revealing far too much. It is enough to say that the Frances becomes attracted to Lilian and that the two conduct a clandestine affair in the nooks and corners of the "gentleman's home," now boarding house. As might be anticipated in a novel by Sarah Waters, there is a crime and the book culminates in a meticulously described, impossible to put down, criminal trial that is a virtuoso performance.

This is a long book, but one that is beautifully paced. It begins in an almost leisurely way, as though the author's major purpose was to provide a social history of London following the Great War. The domestic details are fascinating, especially the woeful lack of comfort in even a solid middle-class home built before the war. No hot running water (a geyser had to be lit before a bath could be run and the gas was so expensive that Frances often bathes in the same water left after her mother's bath). No indoor toilet - there's WC outside in the back, and the Barbers have to traipse though the Wray's kitchen to access it. No electricity laid on, just gas. No wonder Frances' hands are chapped and raw, trying to keep this pile relatively clean under these conditions.

But the pace picks up chapter after chapter. The details are still there, but we become increasing involved with the characters. Waters is an immensely sensual writer with a marvellous ability to turn a vivid phrase. At an impromptu picnic in the park, when Frances and Lilian are still at the Miss Wray, Mrs Barber stage, the simple meal is infused with a kind of magic: "the radishes were crisp, the eggs gave up their shells as if shrugging off cumbersome coats; the parasol, propped up, lent everything its winey colour. And Mrs Barber made the bench appear as comfortable as a sofa, letting herself settle sideways, resting a cheek on her fist." And she can write about sex directly, honestly, and evocatively, a talent not widely present among too many writers who try and fail at amorousness. An astonishing and highly charged game of Snakes and Ladders is a case in point.

Readers who are reluctant to embark on a novel set almost one hundred years ago, fearing either quaintness or awkward shovel loads of information need not worry. The tension becomes wound so tightly that by the time I reached the final third of the book, I had to fight off the temptation to skip ahead to the end simply to relieve my anxiety concerning the fate of the characters. Sarah Waters has forged an admirable reputation as a writer of historical fiction; THE PAYING GUESTS is very likely the best of a string of remarkable novels. It is certainly the best book I've read in a long, long time.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, September 2014

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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