It has been five years since Welsh novelist Sarah Waters’ last book, but for admirers of her well-crafted Sapphic romps through British history, the wait for “The Paying Guests” has seemed even longer. After the interesting but not entirely successful “The Night Watch” and “The Little Stranger,” which abandoned lesbian themes altogether, Waters’ sixth novel returns to her earliest subject matter — the crafting of lesbian identities under hostile social conditions — with a subtler, soberer hand. The result is an oddly melancholy pulse-pounder of a novel that feels more personal and raw than her Victorian triptych, even while it delivers the genre goods.
The setting is, as always, satisfyingly solid. This time, it’s London in the ’20s, a dingy, careworn city where WWI veterans crank music boxes in the street for spare change, widows gather once a year to leaf through old letters from the front, and the upper classes contrive to hide their little economies from the neighbors. At the same time, there is a whiff of liberation in the air, as young women, now in surplus of young men to marry, hem up their skirts, shingle their hair, and move to the city to take jobs and apartments.
Twenty-seven-year-old Frances Wray isn’t one of these. Frances lives with her mother in a large house on Champion Hill, an enclave of upper-class respectability whose air of “Sunday blankness” hints that it, like the rest of England, is missing its champions. Having lost two brothers to the Great War and a father to grief, Frances resigns herself to a life of hard labor, taking on her mother’s sole companionship along with unending housework after they can no longer afford to keep servants.
At first, taking lodgers is one more exercise in renunciation for Frances, and Mr. and Mrs. Barber, the slightly tawdry married couple who live upstairs, one more cross to bear. “We call them paying guests, on Champion Hill,” she explains stiffly to a friend, and the euphemism — so different from the spicy ones that gave “Tipping the Velvet” and “Fingersmith” their titles — hints at the darker ramifications of the exchange.
The first half of the book simmers along at a low boil as Frances continuously bargains with herself over the Cinderella bucket, but the choice to filter the narrative through a determined stoic never feels stuffy or confining, thanks to Waters’ precise details and deft psychological touches:
“There! How pleasing each glossy tile was. The gloss would fade in about five minutes as the surface dried; but everything faded. … She had — what did she have? Little pleasures like this. Little successes in the kitchen. The cigarette at the end of the day. Cinema with her mother on a Wednesday.”
It’s not long, however, before the vividly made-up Lilian Barber smudges the tile, and cinema with Mother is no longer the most exciting thing on the agenda. As Frances finds herself drawn to the beautiful but weak-willed Lilian, her moral certitude begins to crumble away. Crime enters the novel with a bang at the midway point, and the second half becomes a psychological thriller as Frances struggles to regain control over lives irrevocably altered by her own, sometimes brutal, choices.
Waters remains a master of her genre, the historical novel rewritten as a dissection of the individual conscience. The First World War afforded women more freedom than they had ever known — big (though limited) freedoms like the vote, and little ones like smoking and bobbing their hair. Frances, who once threw a shoe at a member of parliament during a war protest, has lost not only her brothers, but also the moral clarity of wartime and its attendant momentary whirl of liberation. When her inevitable love affair opens the door to an authentic sense of self again, the consequences are as devastating as if a thrown shoe were the same as a bullet.
In fact, “The Paying Guest” continually draws parallels between the tragic waste of human life in WWI and the collateral damage caused by Frances’ desire to live life on her own terms. This is sobering stuff, far from the exhilarating, alt-historical wish-fulfillment of “Tipping the Velvet,” closer perhaps to Emma Donoghue’s grisly, underrated “Slammerkin” (particularly in one horrifying scene of a self-induced abortion).
All of Waters’ work has a dark streak, but in the past it has manifested in the pleasurable excesses of genre pastiche — the Dickensian twist in “Fingersmith,” the gothic seances in “Affinity.” Though inspired by sensationalistic murder trials of the ’20s and ’30s, “The Paying Guests” posits a relatively commonplace situation that turns lurid and destructive only because the social fabric of the day cannot sustain it.
The question is never whether having sex with another woman is immoral; rather, it is who gets hurt the most when the social fabric gets ripped asunder. Given the choice to repress her feelings and keep the house in apple-pie order or let the whole thing fall down around her ears, Frances herself nearly comes apart.
This darkness may sit uneasily with modern readers who just want to see a pair of gorgeously dressed flappers have a roll in the hay, but it’s undeniably fascinating. As readers experience Frances’ guilt in intimate detail, the payment referred to in the title looks more and more like the price of personal freedom. The novel never goes so far as to suggest it isn’t worth paying. But in the troubled world of “The Paying Guests,” there’s no way of knowing in advance just who will live to enjoy it.
Amy Gentry is a writer living in Austin, Texas. She has a doctorate degree in English and writes a weekly column for the Austin Chronicle called The Good Eye.
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“The Paying Guests”
By Sarah Waters, Riverhead, 567 pages, $28.95