Fingersmith – Sarah Waters (Virago 2002)

When I try now to sort out who knew what and who knew nothing, who knew everything and who was a fraud, I have to stop and give it up, it makes my head spin.

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At the halfway point in this novel I was thinking it was the best I’d read for years (and I’ll come to the implication in that statement later). The collection of seedy London characters is excellent: matronly Mrs Sucksby who has raised the orphaned narrator; Mr Ibbs who presides over a coin-counterfeiting operation; and ‘Gentleman’, the urbane freeloader with a devilish plan. Mixed in with them are the evocative props of the 19th-century criminal class – gin, knives and a dog that goes wild when it hears the word ‘police’.

Waters is skilled in depicting the bustling but tense kitchen at the heart of this Southwark slum house; she also establishes her narrator’s uncertain and vulnerable status in this threatening setting very effectively. And, ironically, I think it is this skill that weakens the second half of the book in which there is a little too much detailed description of the narrator navigating London’s many dangers. But this is only a quibble.

The book’s other chief appeal is its first-person narrator, Sue’s, failure to see what is coming to her. Of course Sue is telling her story retrospectively, but in so doing she leads the reader along the path she trod first time around, examining her memory as we go. And she frequently addresses the reader, particularly on the details of her narrative: ‘This is when I thought it really began’ and ‘But my story had already started – I was only like you, and didn’t know it.’ Waters uses this sort of device frequently to heighten suspense when Sue questions her interpretation of key moments and reflects on her dangerous ignorance of the future: ‘perhaps I only think that now, when I know what dark and fearful things were to follow.’ And, by the end, you want to read the whole novel again to figure out who knew what along the way.

The second main setting of the novel is Miss Maud Lilly’s large and forbidding country house, where the narrator is sent – in the capacity of a lady’s maid – to practice a vast and wicked deception. It is another deftly depicted place of long corridors, staircases not to mention a library of a particularly nasty nature. The house also contains Maud’s bookish uncle who controls her (and her vast fortune) until she marries. The sprawling grounds of the estate grow in importance after the arrival of ‘Gentleman’ to see through his plan’s execution. But, as Sue’s clues – along with the amount of book remaining in your right hand – have made abundantly clear, this is not nearly the end.

There is a third important setting which I shall not reveal, not to mention many a twist that genuinely shocks. This is a thriller packed with period and character detail, which is also a powerful love story. The deception that complicates most of the relationships increases the reader’s interpretive challenge and maintains the narrative tension almost throughout. And the book ends with one of the strangest final scenes I can remember.