British author Sarah Waters has a wonderful talent for transporting her readers to times long since passed and worlds so immersive that it feels like a wrench to leave them.
Her latest novel conjures early 1920s London, when British citizens were still suffering the after-effects of World War II. The characters in The Paying Guests are grieving for loved ones lost in the war, and poverty is rife in the city, with unemployed former servicemen forced to beg on the streets.
Frances Wray, who is still only in her 20s but considered a spinster, lives alone with her widowed mother in a large villa in a genteel neighbourhood in south London. Struggling to make ends meet after the death of Frances’s father and two brothers, they have made the difficult decision to effectively split their home in two so they can take in paying guests: clerk Leonard Barber and his colourful wife Lilian.
The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters, Hachette Australia, $32.99
Frances and her mother’s hitherto dull lives – church charity activities, housework, tea in the parlour, weekly visits to the “picture house” – are shaken by the lively young newcomers from a very different class. And as Frances’s relationship with the pair becomes more intense and complex, it seems inevitable that some sort of disaster is on the horizon.
“It’s very much about ordinary lives being plunged into the unexpected – the eruption of passion and drama into domestic life,” Waters says of the tale.
Secrets and clandestine passions fuel the fire in The Paying Guests. Waters tantalises her readers with the slow burn of the developing relationships in the first half of the book, but the pace of the narrative positively rages in the second half, with growing tension, twists and turns in a tale that is part love story, part drama and part thriller.
Waters really is a master at her craft, penning characters who are convincing partly because they are so conflicted, and conveying intense emotion in her prose. Historical fiction is the author’s forte, and here she conveys the restrictive social mores and hierarchies of 1920s England, as well invoking as the bleak mood of post-war London.
Waters’ 2006 novel The Night Watch, set in 1940s London, was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, while her last haunting (and haunted) title, The Little Stranger, which she spoke about at Adelaide Writers’ Week, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009. The Paying Guests is equal to both of those, and is guaranteed to please her fans.
The novel is no lightweight, at 564 pages, but I still wished it was longer.
