Sue, brought up among thieves, is sent as a maid to a posh house as part of a plan to steal the fortune of an heiress. Set in mid to late Victorian times and with settings of a thieves' kitchen, a stately home and a lunatic asylum, there is a very Dickensian feel to this novel. It is big and slow-moving, taking time to build the characters, all of whom and beautifully drawn (in contrast to Dickens whose eccentrics are more picturesque but less convincing). The thoroughness of the story-telling meant that, for me, the story dragged a little in the second part (when the events of the first part are more or less repeated from the perspective of a different protagonist and so there is little 'new' stuff). But the ending of the first part had a twist which was entirely unexpected.
There are moments of pin-point-perfect description: "The moon struck the rushes of the further bank, and made spears of them, with wicked points ... I saw the oars dip and rise, and scatter coins of moonlight." (Ch 6)
There are moments straight out of Dickens: "You think you've torments ... Have these knuckles for an hour - have these thumbs. Here's torments, with mustard on. Here's torments, with whips." (Ch 14)
There are some astute moments of social commentary:
- "Do you suppose that when that money was first got, it was got honestly? Don't think it! Money never is. It is got, by families like hers, from the backs of the poor - twenty backs broken for every shilling made." (Ch 1)
- "Servants grow sentimental over the swells they work for, like dogs grow fond of bullies." (Ch 3)
- "Your heart - as you call it - and hers are alike, after all: they are like mine, like everyone's. They resemble nothing so much as those meters you will find on gas-pipes: they only perk up and start pumping when you drop coins in." (Ch 5)
- "Not the commonplace subjection of a wife to a husband - that servitude, to lawful ravishment and theft, that the world terms wedlock." (Ch 8)
Other great moments included:
- "John laughed. 'I likes to see her cry', he said. 'It makes her sweat the less'. He was an evil boy, all right." (Ch 2)
- "Her husband had been a sailor, and been lost at sea. Lost to her, I mean. He lived in the Bahamas." (Ch 2)
- "Country roads aren't like city ones. There are only about four of them, and they all go to the same place in the end." (Ch 2)
- "I thought, if that wasn't love, then I was a Dutchman; and if it was love, then lovers were pigeons and geese, and I was glad I was not one of them." (Ch 4)
- "She will be like everyone, putting on the things she sees the constructions she expects to find there." (Ch 8)
- "They were no more nurses than I was, they only got that work through being stout and having great big hands like mangles." (Ch 14)
A large and slow-moving book with a very Dickensian feeling for the period.
In 2002, thisa book was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the Women's Prize for fiction.
Other books by Sarah Waters reviewed in this blog include:
- The Night Watch, set in World War 2
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