The Stuff Behind It
Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests
Virago, 576pp, £9.00, ISBN 9780349004365
reviewed by Eli Davies
In an interview a few years ago, Sarah Waters outlined a kind of mission statement. 'What I'm after,' she said, 'is a gripping read, with stuff going on behind it.' The romp-factor of Waters’s fiction is well-known, and is probably at its most potent in 2002’s Fingersmith, which was, in part, an homage to Victorian crime fiction. On the surface her style, though studded with the language of her historical period, is plain and unfussy, and this may sometimes give the reader a feeling that her writing is simpler than it is. But this is where the 'stuff' comes in – the themes woven through her narratives and the relationships therein: gender, desire, feminism, social change, class. Waters’ main characters all live on the fringes in one way or another and sexuality – and the ways it interacts with the social world – plays a crucial role.
Waters has turned inwards with the The Paying Guests. The marginal spaces here are mostly in the private, domestic world, tucked away in darkened bathrooms, hallways, suburban lanes. The novel is set in London in 1922, and the major part of the action takes place in the genteel south London suburb of Champion Hill, where the inhabitants try to continue with life as normal but are left slightly dazed by the conflict and social upheaval left in the aftermath of the war. The protagonist, Frances Wray, is a practical-minded woman in her late twenties, a lesbian living in a kind of enforced celibacy due to the demands of household management and her widowed mother. The mother-daughter relationship here is a kind of purse-lipped affair: there is companionship, but no real closeness or solace. Frances’s sexuality, we realise, is something which her mother knows about but wishes to deny. In need of extra income, the Wrays take in Lilian and Leonard Barber as lodgers. The Barbers gradually unsettle their lives with their domestic presence and habits – and, later on – with violent disturbance.
Lilian and Leonard arrive in a tangle of bohemian clutter, of houseplants and lamps and fringed shawls (the details all count here). Their presence in the house brings with it a strange unease and sense of displacement in Frances’s mother particularly, who has a snobbish discomfort with her new role of ‘landlady’. The rearrangement of rooms to accommodate the lodgers, the installation of a gas meter in their kitchen, the collection of rent – with these details Waters questions what it means to live in a house, what comprises a home and shows how these notions are contingent. There is a very simple, robust strain of feminism running through all of Waters’s writing and Frances is a classic character in this sense. Self-sufficient and independent, she is practical about the need to monetise their living space and proud that they manage so well without men. This is a female world in which men lay claim to space in impractical and irritating ways – as with the ugly and cumbersome furniture that her late father bought and which still gets in Frances’s way as she cleans, or the ways in which Leonard lingers in the kitchen with Frances for no apparent reason, as if merely to make his presence felt.
The difficulty of maintaining the Champion Hill house, which Frances takes sole responsiblity for, is foregrounded from the beginning. Details of housework and furniture recur throughout – they play a key part in the story’s dramatic turning point – and Waters spends a good deal of time in the opening chapters describing all of this to us. The floorboards which have been polished for the lodgers’ arrival have 'the shine of dark toffee.' We see the method Frances uses to scrub the floors and the small pleasure that she gets from bringing tiles to a glossy shine. It is striking how much time Waters spends on these small details, which in turn raises the striking question of why most novels rarely dwell on housework. Here, it functions in various ways: it underlines Mrs Wray’s class anxieties, her embarrassment at having fallen on the hard times which mean it is now her daughter, rather than a servant, who scrubs floors and takes rubbish out. For Frances, housework represents control over the household and a kind of autonomy, but also the abandonment of an alternative self, the self who was free to lead her life, unshackled by the demands and conventions of a domestic, suburban life.
The Paying Guests is, at least in part, a love story, and a major disruption to Frances’s world comes from Lilian, who at first unsettles with her effortless femininity around the house and later, when their affair has begun, with the intensity of the desire she inspires. For a time, the book becomes about their relationship, and there are some moments of real romance and tenderness here: the breathless anticipation with which they wait for each other; the dizzy excitement Frances feels after they’ve made love; the dreamy, fanciful plans they make to run away together. But we are never allowed to forget that this is no ‘ordinary’ affair. Their affection must be confined to private spaces – Frances cannot kiss Lilian out on the street as she wishes; Waters captures Frances’s loneliness at having to hide her sexuality and the ways in which the everyday and ‘normal’ can be painful and alienating – when Lilian and Leonard go out dancing with another couple, for example, or even just try to share a living space naturally. When Lilian says: 'It isn’t as if I’m going with a man, is it?' it underscores that Frances’s desires, her feelings, are regarded by society (and her partner), as lesser, somehow not real.
After 20 or so pages of all this the timbre changes very suddenly into something more grisly. The tension kicks in and what has for a few chapters been a romance becomes a thriller. The remainder of the novel explores violence and anxiety, cover-ups and deception. We see the strain all this places on the central relationship, as well as on the social dynamics of their south-London world. And despite its mainly suburban setting, London does, as in most other Waters novels, have a role to play in all this. In this case, it’s a city still smarting from the effects of the war, in which a sense of disquiet pervades: references to crazed ex-servicemen and half-destroyed buildings are scattered throughout the text. In Champion Hill all this turmoil intensifies the snobbery, repression and social conservatism of its inhabitants. A violent crime in the street sends ripples of unease through the neighbourhood at the uncivilised behaviour that has been unleashed by the war in the lower classes, those who 'had to be conscripted into defending their country while the sons of the gentry had willingly laid down their lives', and who are now demanding higher wages for their work.
Amidst all the drama and suspense, the book still continues to be about bigger things – about social change and how to negotiate relationships, sexuality and gender roles. It becomes apparent, yet again, what a skillful balancing act Waters is pulling off. Before the book’s gear change, when we are embedded in the relationship between Frances and Lilian, there are moments where the language becomes heightened, where it is almost too much. But Waters, alive to the contradictions and complexities of relationships, doesn’t let this go on for too long. She pulls back and, of course, throws in the customary ‘twist’ that gives the whole thing its edge. The Paying Guests is not a thriller in the conventional sense – there is no easy resolution to any of what is opened up in this story, and a kind of beautiful ambiguity to its conclusion. But this is Waters at her best – where the 'stuff going on behind' a gripping read is at its most subtle and complex.
Waters has turned inwards with the The Paying Guests. The marginal spaces here are mostly in the private, domestic world, tucked away in darkened bathrooms, hallways, suburban lanes. The novel is set in London in 1922, and the major part of the action takes place in the genteel south London suburb of Champion Hill, where the inhabitants try to continue with life as normal but are left slightly dazed by the conflict and social upheaval left in the aftermath of the war. The protagonist, Frances Wray, is a practical-minded woman in her late twenties, a lesbian living in a kind of enforced celibacy due to the demands of household management and her widowed mother. The mother-daughter relationship here is a kind of purse-lipped affair: there is companionship, but no real closeness or solace. Frances’s sexuality, we realise, is something which her mother knows about but wishes to deny. In need of extra income, the Wrays take in Lilian and Leonard Barber as lodgers. The Barbers gradually unsettle their lives with their domestic presence and habits – and, later on – with violent disturbance.
Lilian and Leonard arrive in a tangle of bohemian clutter, of houseplants and lamps and fringed shawls (the details all count here). Their presence in the house brings with it a strange unease and sense of displacement in Frances’s mother particularly, who has a snobbish discomfort with her new role of ‘landlady’. The rearrangement of rooms to accommodate the lodgers, the installation of a gas meter in their kitchen, the collection of rent – with these details Waters questions what it means to live in a house, what comprises a home and shows how these notions are contingent. There is a very simple, robust strain of feminism running through all of Waters’s writing and Frances is a classic character in this sense. Self-sufficient and independent, she is practical about the need to monetise their living space and proud that they manage so well without men. This is a female world in which men lay claim to space in impractical and irritating ways – as with the ugly and cumbersome furniture that her late father bought and which still gets in Frances’s way as she cleans, or the ways in which Leonard lingers in the kitchen with Frances for no apparent reason, as if merely to make his presence felt.
The difficulty of maintaining the Champion Hill house, which Frances takes sole responsiblity for, is foregrounded from the beginning. Details of housework and furniture recur throughout – they play a key part in the story’s dramatic turning point – and Waters spends a good deal of time in the opening chapters describing all of this to us. The floorboards which have been polished for the lodgers’ arrival have 'the shine of dark toffee.' We see the method Frances uses to scrub the floors and the small pleasure that she gets from bringing tiles to a glossy shine. It is striking how much time Waters spends on these small details, which in turn raises the striking question of why most novels rarely dwell on housework. Here, it functions in various ways: it underlines Mrs Wray’s class anxieties, her embarrassment at having fallen on the hard times which mean it is now her daughter, rather than a servant, who scrubs floors and takes rubbish out. For Frances, housework represents control over the household and a kind of autonomy, but also the abandonment of an alternative self, the self who was free to lead her life, unshackled by the demands and conventions of a domestic, suburban life.
The Paying Guests is, at least in part, a love story, and a major disruption to Frances’s world comes from Lilian, who at first unsettles with her effortless femininity around the house and later, when their affair has begun, with the intensity of the desire she inspires. For a time, the book becomes about their relationship, and there are some moments of real romance and tenderness here: the breathless anticipation with which they wait for each other; the dizzy excitement Frances feels after they’ve made love; the dreamy, fanciful plans they make to run away together. But we are never allowed to forget that this is no ‘ordinary’ affair. Their affection must be confined to private spaces – Frances cannot kiss Lilian out on the street as she wishes; Waters captures Frances’s loneliness at having to hide her sexuality and the ways in which the everyday and ‘normal’ can be painful and alienating – when Lilian and Leonard go out dancing with another couple, for example, or even just try to share a living space naturally. When Lilian says: 'It isn’t as if I’m going with a man, is it?' it underscores that Frances’s desires, her feelings, are regarded by society (and her partner), as lesser, somehow not real.
After 20 or so pages of all this the timbre changes very suddenly into something more grisly. The tension kicks in and what has for a few chapters been a romance becomes a thriller. The remainder of the novel explores violence and anxiety, cover-ups and deception. We see the strain all this places on the central relationship, as well as on the social dynamics of their south-London world. And despite its mainly suburban setting, London does, as in most other Waters novels, have a role to play in all this. In this case, it’s a city still smarting from the effects of the war, in which a sense of disquiet pervades: references to crazed ex-servicemen and half-destroyed buildings are scattered throughout the text. In Champion Hill all this turmoil intensifies the snobbery, repression and social conservatism of its inhabitants. A violent crime in the street sends ripples of unease through the neighbourhood at the uncivilised behaviour that has been unleashed by the war in the lower classes, those who 'had to be conscripted into defending their country while the sons of the gentry had willingly laid down their lives', and who are now demanding higher wages for their work.
Amidst all the drama and suspense, the book still continues to be about bigger things – about social change and how to negotiate relationships, sexuality and gender roles. It becomes apparent, yet again, what a skillful balancing act Waters is pulling off. Before the book’s gear change, when we are embedded in the relationship between Frances and Lilian, there are moments where the language becomes heightened, where it is almost too much. But Waters, alive to the contradictions and complexities of relationships, doesn’t let this go on for too long. She pulls back and, of course, throws in the customary ‘twist’ that gives the whole thing its edge. The Paying Guests is not a thriller in the conventional sense – there is no easy resolution to any of what is opened up in this story, and a kind of beautiful ambiguity to its conclusion. But this is Waters at her best – where the 'stuff going on behind' a gripping read is at its most subtle and complex.