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decemberthirtyI finished Sarah Waters's Affinity last night. I ended up liking it quite a bit, but it wasn't at all the book that I expected. I expected it to be more along the lines of Fingersmith, a "lesbo-Victorian romp" as Waters herself once described her work. While Affinity is certainly both lesbo and Victorian, the romp part of the equation seems to be missing. Fingersmith is all fast-paced complexity, shocking plot twists, and suspense, whereas Affinity develops much more slowly and manifests its complexity not in the plot but in the layers of unreliability that cloud the narrative. There is tension in Affinity, certainly, but it takes much longer to develop than the tension in Fingersmith; I dawdled for two weeks through the first 300 pages of the book, and then read the last 60 in a gulp.
Affinity is a very dark book--Waters is not a writer who is afraid of the Gothic! The story is set mainly inside Millbank, a huge and grim prison on the banks of the Thames, and is woven throughout with themes of class, sex, desire, and betrayal. Spiritualism plays a major role in this book, and we are given glimpses into strange, sexualized séances in which the medium is bound to her chair with velvet restraints and spirits appear for the sole purpose of breathing on the necks of pretty girls. The darkness of the book is not all fun and sexy, however. Suicide, isolation, mental illness, and desperate loneliness all come into play as well.
I was most interested and impressed by the uncertain elements of the narration, and the way Waters allows that uncertainty to build slowly throughout the novel. First we wonder how much to trust Selina Dawes--does she truly believe what she says about spirits? How much of her work as a medium was a hoax? Margaret Prior, on the other hand, seems trustworthy: she seems sad and intelligent, sympathetic, terribly misunderstood by a world that can't comprehend that a woman might rather be a scholar than mistress of a house. And she is sad and intelligent and all the rest of these things, but as the novel goes on and we read more and more of her journal, we begin to wonder whether her perceptions match up with reality, or whether her mind has been so influenced by laudanum and her own desperation that she no longer sees things as they are. This is brought home by a lovely subtle moment when Margaret and Helen both look at the same painting and see very different things...
The biggest flaw of Affinity is the fact that Waters sometimes seems to let her research show a bit too much. She devotes long passages to the workings of the prison, describing in detail everything from the laundry room to the infirmary to the kitchens. This stuff is interesting, but bears no real relation to the story and I couldn't help but think that Waters just included it because she had read all about it herself and didn't want that to go to waste. On the plus side, there is some really beautiful writing in the book. I'm thinking particularly of an evocative passage describing the prison in winter--surprisingly lovely for such a bleak subject.
I don't know quite what to make of the ending of Affinity. I don't mind the fact that it's not a happy ending, but there's something about it that's unsatisfying entirely separate from the question of whether it's happy or not. I don't know exactly what that is. Perhaps too much mystery is dispelled by the ending, and things that had seemed powerful and strange are shown to be ordinary. Or perhaps it's that I was able to piece things together just the tiniest bit ahead of reading them--not far enough ahead to call the ending predictable, but enough so that none of it truly shocked me.
So, Affinity was different than the rollicking good time I thought it might be, and the ending was just a little bit off, but it was still a very good book. Atmospheric, sensual, subtle, and then wonderfully tense near the end. I definitely intend to read more Waters. I have Night Watch sitting on the shelf upstairs, but Ms. E read that last summer and said it wasn't very good... Perhaps I will have to seek out Tipping the Velvet instead.
In the meantime, I'm going to try to make a dent in my to-read shelf. I think I'm going to read Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go next.
Affinity is a very dark book--Waters is not a writer who is afraid of the Gothic! The story is set mainly inside Millbank, a huge and grim prison on the banks of the Thames, and is woven throughout with themes of class, sex, desire, and betrayal. Spiritualism plays a major role in this book, and we are given glimpses into strange, sexualized séances in which the medium is bound to her chair with velvet restraints and spirits appear for the sole purpose of breathing on the necks of pretty girls. The darkness of the book is not all fun and sexy, however. Suicide, isolation, mental illness, and desperate loneliness all come into play as well.
I was most interested and impressed by the uncertain elements of the narration, and the way Waters allows that uncertainty to build slowly throughout the novel. First we wonder how much to trust Selina Dawes--does she truly believe what she says about spirits? How much of her work as a medium was a hoax? Margaret Prior, on the other hand, seems trustworthy: she seems sad and intelligent, sympathetic, terribly misunderstood by a world that can't comprehend that a woman might rather be a scholar than mistress of a house. And she is sad and intelligent and all the rest of these things, but as the novel goes on and we read more and more of her journal, we begin to wonder whether her perceptions match up with reality, or whether her mind has been so influenced by laudanum and her own desperation that she no longer sees things as they are. This is brought home by a lovely subtle moment when Margaret and Helen both look at the same painting and see very different things...
The biggest flaw of Affinity is the fact that Waters sometimes seems to let her research show a bit too much. She devotes long passages to the workings of the prison, describing in detail everything from the laundry room to the infirmary to the kitchens. This stuff is interesting, but bears no real relation to the story and I couldn't help but think that Waters just included it because she had read all about it herself and didn't want that to go to waste. On the plus side, there is some really beautiful writing in the book. I'm thinking particularly of an evocative passage describing the prison in winter--surprisingly lovely for such a bleak subject.
I don't know quite what to make of the ending of Affinity. I don't mind the fact that it's not a happy ending, but there's something about it that's unsatisfying entirely separate from the question of whether it's happy or not. I don't know exactly what that is. Perhaps too much mystery is dispelled by the ending, and things that had seemed powerful and strange are shown to be ordinary. Or perhaps it's that I was able to piece things together just the tiniest bit ahead of reading them--not far enough ahead to call the ending predictable, but enough so that none of it truly shocked me.
So, Affinity was different than the rollicking good time I thought it might be, and the ending was just a little bit off, but it was still a very good book. Atmospheric, sensual, subtle, and then wonderfully tense near the end. I definitely intend to read more Waters. I have Night Watch sitting on the shelf upstairs, but Ms. E read that last summer and said it wasn't very good... Perhaps I will have to seek out Tipping the Velvet instead.
In the meantime, I'm going to try to make a dent in my to-read shelf. I think I'm going to read Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go next.
