A review by katdid
The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters

5.0

She could feel herself advancing steadily but helplessly into a state of dejection - as steadily and helplessly as if she were being screwed into it.

Waters' [b:Fingersmith|45162|Fingersmith|Sarah Waters|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327879025s/45162.jpg|1014113] is one of the few books that, out of all my loves, I devoutly wish I'd written myself. It was the first novel of hers that I read and while her body of work is consistently impressive none of the others have spoken to me in the same way. But The Paying Guests is, I think, her masterpiece. (I say that but in all honesty Fingersmith still has my heart.) Set in London in 1922 it details the events that transpire when Frances and her mother, living in reduced circumstances following the deaths of the family males, rent out part of their house to a young married couple. Waters creates the sense of time and place so completely that it actually threw me out of the story - How does she know that? I thought more than once about a minor detail. The level of research that clearly made the backbone of this novel is staggering. But the narrative is entertaining too!

Frances I thought was such an interesting and well-drawn character; the word "bravery" gets thrown around a lot in the book but I do think Frances is maybe Waters' bravest creation. She knows who she is and she has a level of emotional courage in declaring her feelings that kinda took my breath away. And because of this - because of who Frances is, and what she wants - we seem to come to the turning point of the novel much earlier than I'd anticipated. And then everything is accelerated - the narrative fairly gallops away. Look, I know it's probably not a lot of people's cup of tea; that's okay. But you have to give the rest of us this one. It's pretty amazing, what Waters can do, and if you're into it then you could read about household chores and high-spirited strangers in the train carriage and awful teeth forever. I really felt, though, that she nailed the pacing with The Paying Guests.

This morning I was trying to describe the book to someone who'd never heard of Waters. "It's lesbian fiction... set after World War I," I said lamely. But labelling it like that is doing the work a huge disservice. It's a love story, and consequently it is really fucking terrible: awful things happen, and dreadful things are said, and hard decisions are made, and lives are destroyed.

Spoiler

No one escapes unscathed. Despite the trial ending with the best possible outcome - and I really found that moving, that the jury (against all expectations) believed the testimony of the accused's neighbour, the one person who more than anyone in the story stepped up and did the right thing at great cost to themselves - you just can't believe that Frances and Lilian will enjoy a happy life together. It was kinda brutal, that - like, they have no choice but to love each other however little either of them might want to.

But the feeling had something wrong about it. The lightness was the lightness of ash. She was scorched, dried out.