Romance or Crime? Review of ‘The Paying Guests’

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ondon, 1922 –  Frances Wray is slowly becoming a spinster. She lives with her widowed mother in a villa which their dwindling finances are unable to maintain; the losses of the First World War weigh heavily upon their lives. In order to make ends meet, the Wrays are forced to take on lodgers, or ‘paying guests’: Leonard and Lilian Barber, young and modern members of the clerk class who grate harshly against Mrs Wray’s Edwardian values. In a novel which is part love story, part crime thriller, a blossoming romance between Frances and Lilian leads to something entirely more sinister.

The Paying Guests is the sixth novel from Sarah Waters, an author famed for her inventive approaches to genre, and for the lesbian characters who populate her books. With the vast success of Waters’ existing body of work – which has received extensive attention, including popular BBC adaptions of Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith, and The Night Watch – The Paying Guests has a lot to live up to. For me, it does not fail to deliver.

At first, the story appears deceptively mundane. The first half occupies itself with scenes from the Wrays’ domestic life, laced expertly with a building relationship between Frances and Lilian. Waters is extremely successful at capturing the mundaneness of Frances’ existence, describing her routine of chores in detail. One passage narrating the cleaning of a floor particularly seemed to transport me into Frances’ world, so that I might have been there scrubbing the tiles beside her.

“The first, wet rub was important for loosening the dirt, but it was the second bit that really counted, passing the wrung cloth over the floor in one supple, unbroken movement… There! How pleasing each glossy tile was.”

This sensation of being pulled into Frances’ experiences is furthered by Waters’ voice: her writing is straight-forward and traditional, punctuated with quaintly old-fashioned phrases and dated slang that constantly remind you of the novel’s historical setting. Due to its simplicity, however, at times the narrative is lacking in poetic appeal. Parts of the novel are perhaps in danger of being dull. Luckily, I found the plot engaging enough to propel me through these hazy areas, but it is a shame that Waters’ prose doesn’t maintain the level of effectiveness that it achieves so well in certain instances.

The scenes in which Waters’ direct narrative approach is most successful are those relating to Frances and Lilian’s love affair. From her previous work, Waters has grown somewhat infamous for her refusal to be shy about sex between women, and The Paying Guests is no exception to this rule. Although the love scenes are less numerous than those in certain of her other novels, the few that are present are as explicit as ever. However, the lack of squeamishness with which Waters writes manages to prevent the reading from being an awkward experience. The tenderness of Frances and Lilian’s interactions – such as one beautiful moment in which Lilian mimes drawing a stake from Frances’ heart – means that the emotional significance of these encounters at all times holds precedence over their erotic nature.

Where the first half of ‘The Paying Guests’ presents itself as a touching love story, a gorily turbulent sequence of events at the novel’s midpoint sees the genre transform from romance into crime.

Waters’ aforementioned refusal to be squeamish begins to take a darker turn as the plot progresses. She is grotesquely vivid in her descriptions of blood which is “dark as black treacle,” and a dead body “slumped forward like a Guy Fawkes over its own splayed legs.” This is the same attentive narration from earlier, now transformed into a foul parody of itself.

The following half of the novel is planted firmly in the crime genre and, in my opinion, this half is the better. Featuring an assortment of typical scenes from a crime thriller, with a focus on the emotional repercussions of murder which are less talked-about by crime authors, the story now becomes frantic and heavily charged. From this point, the plot moves forwards with a wild energy, racing through events that are as thrilling as they are unexpected. At no point does the novel’s ending become predictable; I found myself still trying to guess what would happen as I turned the final page. It is rare for an author to be able to create and then to hold tension so entirely for such an extended period.

For Waters, who thoroughly researches each of her novels’ historical eras prior to writing them, this tension is characteristic of the 1920s.

“I could see almost immediately (what) a very restless and unhappy time the early ‘20s were – nothing at all like our stereotypes of flappers and Bright Young Things… There was this strange energy around – perhaps a sort of nervous energy.”

As someone whose knowledge of the period is confined to The Great Gatsby, I certainly found The Paying Guests to offer a drastically different vision of the ‘20s. Even scenes that take place at social gatherings lack the perceived glamour and glitz of the era; with this scraped away, what’s left is a sense of unease and uncertainty in every character. Waters’ idea of a ‘nervous energy’ is truly tangible throughout.

Despite the novel’s identity as a piece of historical fiction, it manages at the same time to feel relevant and contemporary, perhaps thanks to the universal level at which it speaks

Everyone can relate to the anxiety experienced by Frances, to her fears that her life will amount to nothing, that her future is already laid out before her and that she must “be content with (her) role, that (she) is settling so nicely into, like an oyster digging its dumb way into the sea bed.” Or perhaps the novel’s contemporary feel is thanks to its preoccupation with the timeless topics of love and death. These two are intermingled so frequently throughout the history of literature, and here they collide with riveting consequences.

It is this theme of collision which characterises The Paying Guests for me: a collision of love and death; a collision of class between the Wrays and the Barbers; a collision of genre between romance and crime; and a pivotal collision between a blunt object and one man’s head.