Fingersmith
Sarah Waters Virago, 416pp, £12.99
ISBN 1860498825
Fingersmith is a lesbian historical romance set in a 19th-century underworld of Southwark thieves and a damp country house in which the library shelves are bulging with pornography. There is an extravagant plot replete with treachery, betrayal, substitutions of infants at birth and mothers that are either murderous or mad. Sarah Waters unveils enough secrets, reversals and revelations to keep the most demanding fans of Victorian fiction happy and enthralled, bowing to the great novels of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens in ways that are both fanciful and intelligent. She draws the reader into a linguistic world where the vocabulary of thieves - poke, prigging, coins that must be slummed - is evoked with an arch knowingness that remains just this side of pastiche. If the minor characters are Dickensian, the themes and structures echo Collins.
The novel is about a gang of confidence tricksters and their attempt to defraud an heiress of her fortune. All the characters have several identities, either unknowingly or deliberately. The two heroines, Maud and Sue, change places with dizzying frequency. As one of them explains, "they have made you think me her and her me". The reader is delightfully confused. The men in this novel have important roles as stagey villains with whiskers, pornographic book fetishists and ignorant, sadistic madhouse doctors, but the main action is played out between the women. Maud and Sue move towards each other in a slow dance of courtship. Their roles, as mistress and maid, involve a minute intimacy of removing and applying petticoats, stays, crinolines, gowns, stockings, garters and slippers. Their passion develops across the terrifying domestic familiarity of the laden chamber pot and the sweating armpit. Waters writes a version of the 19th century that smells strongly of unwashed bodies, smeared privies and overflowing drains.
The pace of her writing is daringly slow. I must admit to a lurch of alarm when, almost 200 pages into the novel, I realised that the next 200 were going to contain almost exactly the same events from a different heroine's point of view. However, Waters manages, just, to keep her reader's confidence and attention by skilful plotting and plenty of surprises. The fracturing of the tale into several first-person narratives that transform and contradict one another is characteristic of 19th-century fiction. Wilkie Collins used this technique to disturbing effect in The Moonstone. Waters has been taught by masters.
What are the advantages of placing a tale of lesbian passion in the past? This is a cunning literary strategy that reinvents and makes visible what remains a largely invisible and unrecorded history. The scenes of Sapphic self-discovery can be written with a flourish of conviction and need never have a tragic end. Here we are, and perhaps - for who knows otherwise? - here we always were, hidden in the seams of fiction, in the voluptuous tradition of erotic writing. Lesbian love can be presented as not only perfectly natural, but also historically authentic. The lesbian historical romance has a gallant pedigree. Virginia Woolf's Orlando is the modernist gender-bending version, but there are some playful feminist novels. My own favourite remains Ellen Galford's Moll Cutpurse: her true history, a jolly adaptation of Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl, set in Shakespeare's London. In all these fictions, the lesbian is a trickster, the knave in the pack.
Waters follows this tradition in Fingersmith, another London fiction that explores the doubleness of the lesbian by, quite literally, turning her into two women. Maud and Sue share a common inheritance. Even the classic Victorian fictional device of the legacy that ensures the heroine's happiness is wheeled out with energy and panache. We are promised a romance ending.
Yet what I found evocative in Fingersmith are the two settings. The damp, slow world of the house at Briar with its endless chilly staircases and passages, the mist on the river, the greening graves and the swollen front door all place the reader inside the mental world of the heroine. And the vivid sexual bustle of the city, described in one thrilling escape sequence, leaps from the page in horrid splendour.
Patricia Duncker's new novel, The Deadly Space Between, is published by Picador on 22 March
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