Oh lordy but Sarah Waters knows how to tell a good story, and I mean good story. Her plots are like a coil twisting tighter and tighter and then all of a sudden springing free when you least expect it. Affinity is set for the most part in the Victorian women's prison Millbank and concerns one of the inmates, a spiritualist, and a Lady Visitor. Although Fingersmith is still my favorite, I enjoyed Affinity far more than I thought I would.
I love ghost stories, though I can't really say I believe in ghosts. I like the uncertainty that a really good ghost story might provoke, however. Sarah Waters is an excellent writer, but I started reading Affinity with a little trepidation. Could I really sit through an entire novel about Spiritualism? The Spiritualist movement was at its peak in the mid-1800s, so this is a prime topic for Waters to write about. Still, I've always thought of Spiritualists as being charlatans, feeding on other people's grief over the loss of loved ones. Could Waters really convince me? I will say she had me going for a while, and I wondered if she could pull it off. She did, though I won't tell you how, as this is one novel I can heartily recommend you read, and it's best not to know too much of what's in store.
Margaret Prior is an upper-class lady, though quickly verging on spinsterhood. After the death of her father, with whom she shared a close relationship, she has a mental breakdown. Margaret is an intellectual, always helping her father with his work, she had expected to travel to Italy with him and a friend. Her father died, though, and her friend married Margaret's brother, so now she has little to keep her together except the chloral that her mother dispenses to her each evening, carefully measuring out each dose. A Victorian woman so often had little to keep her mind stimulated, it must have felt horribly oppressive and Waters marvelously captures that feeling of claustrophobia--both in Margaret's mind and in the prison as well. As part of her rehabilitation she begins visiting the women incarcerated at Millbank Prison, which has to be one of the direst places in all of Victorian London. Built in the shape of a pentagon, it's approached through many gates and twisting passages. It's dark and dank and and cold, and no flower will grow on the prison's grounds.
With each visit Margaret is taken to different parts of the prison and introduced to assorted inmates; murderers, thieves, coiners (counterfeiters), abortionists--the whole realm of misdeeds a woman might do. She's meant to offer the women comfort and act as a role model--being a Lady. The women can be viewed without their knowledge through 'inspection slits' or 'eyes' and Margaret catches a glimpse of a woman she thinks she's seen before--a painted angel in portrait by Crivelli.
"...I knew the cell was occupied at all, for there seemed to emanate from it a marvelous stillness--a silence, that seemed deeper yet than all the restless Millbank hush surrounding it. Even as I began to wonder over it, however, the silence was broken. It was broken by a sigh, a single sigh--it seemed to me a perfect sigh, like a sigh in a story; and the sigh being such a complement to my own mood I found it worked upon me, in that setting, rather strangely."
Sitting in her wooden chair with her knitting in her lap, Selina Dawes had her head turned to catch the sun. Margaret watched her for a minute, as she sat perfectly still in an "almost devotional pose." In her hand she held a violet, and as Margaret watched, "she put the flower to her lips, and breathed upon it, and the purple petals gave a quiver and seemed to glow..."
Selina Dawes was a Spirtualist of the first class before a séance she was conducting went horribly wrong. Selina's patron, an elderly woman, was frightened to death, and a younger woman assaulted and left deeply disturbed. Two years later Selina sits in prison, where Margaret spies her. Next to her name on the door her crime is listed--assault and fraud. Margaret feels great sympathy for the women in Millbank despite their crimes. Left to rot in their cold cells with no kind words or actions, Margaret is drawn particularly to the enigmatic Selina. She's at first doubtful of Selina's abilities, but strange things begin to happen.
The story is told through the diary entries of both Margaret and Selina, so you get to see each side of the story, which slowly unravels. What's truth and what's reality, and how are perceptions colored? This is a wonderfully evoked novel. Waters gets everything right--characters, setting, plot. It almost amazes me how she can pull it off yet again. This is a juicy story--twisty-turny and surprising. It's the sort of book where you don't know what to pick up next that will be half as satisfying. I think I need to stay away from Victorian London for a while (she does it too well). I'm extremely tempted to pick up another of her books--I have two more on hand, but how will they compare? I think I'll ration them, and look for something completely different as I let the dust settle on this one.