I made the mistake of looking at the acknowledgements in the back of this book when only half way through it and that gave away some, at least, of what was going to happen. It's a tremendous novel and I recommend you read it but, if you intend to, then it might be best not to read on from here because it will be hard not to give some essential details away if I'm going to say anything very much at all, so
SPOILER ALERT- Don't read any further unless you don't mind having most of the story revealed.
It didn't spoil the book completely to be made aware that much of the research for it involved reading books on famous 1920's murder trials but, as the novel moves through its slowly unfolding first half, you might not want to know that.
Frances Wray and her mother have been left in precarious financial circumstances by the death of her father and his ill-considered investments and let out half of their house to a married couple as 'paying guests'. There is much of the 'shabby gentility' found in Maupassant in their reduced situation, the nuances of diminished social status and their small, ordinary life. When Leonard and Lilian move in as tenants, Frances is very aware of their intimate nearness, the sounds of their domestic arrangements and there are regular awkward meetings as the lodgers need to pass through the main kitchen to go to the outdoor lavatory. Leonard is immediately just a little bit too forthcoming but Frances and Lilian gradually become friends and then, well, it is a Sarah Waters novel, isn't it.
Ms. Waters has meticulously built in telling detail for the purposes of both for plot and characterisation. It had occurred to me that the attack on Leonard might have been as a result of womanising but it lies dormant for a long time before becoming relevant. Once the crisis point has been reached, it develops with beautifully handled minor shifts and moments that lead onwards to an increasingly complex situation. Eventually, it hardly matters that one knew there was going to be a murder because it could go in a number of directions at any given point and if you think Lilian is going to hang by the end of it then you're still not going to be completely sure at the end.
Just for a while in the middle, one might think one is stuck in the sort of genre novel presumably explored in such books as The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity and Bohemianism which this book is probably homage to but the complexity and possibilities of the case are gripping and the book is an obvious television drama in waiting.
But atmospheric and all period detail as an adaptation would be, it would never satisfactorily reproduce some of Sarah Waters' best passages here, the capturing of Frances' mood when she sees through the veneer of glamour that she had admired in Lilian,
There they all were, the silk forget-me-nots, the slips of paper with the kisses and the hearts: they looked childish, grotesque.
For nearly the last 100 pages, Frances is caught between the rapturous affair she has carried on in secret with Lilian and a new found disgust. She is driven to an emotional limit not only by this ambivalence but so many near misses when minute but telling pieces of evidence are so close to surfacing in the prsence of policemen or, almost as fearfully, her mother.
It is 1922 and so the effects of World War 1 on social conditions are still very pertinent, the character of Spencer Ward, who comes dangerously close to hanging for the murder, mainly on the evidence of his background is for me a brilliantly executed piece of stereotyping, as is much of the working class portraiture, all really a bit beneath Frances in manner but no longer ostensibly in financial terms. And it ends on a precious, delicate moment in which there is still boundless potential.
I have enjoyed the Sarah Waters books I've read previously but not anywhere near as much as I enjoyed this one, which I was glad to get back to whenever I could.
