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Summary
Summary
It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned; the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa - a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants - life is about to be transformed as impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers.
With the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the "clerk class," the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. Little do the Wrays know just how profoundly their new tenants will alter the course of Frances's life - or, as passions mount and frustration gathers, how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be.
Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize three times, Sarah Waters has earned a reputation as one of our greatest writers of historical fiction, and here she has delivered again. A love story, a tension-filled crime story, and a beautifully atmospheric portrait of a fascinating time and place, The Paying Guests is Sarah Waters's finest achievement yet.
Author Notes
Sarah Waters was born in Wales in 1966. She has a Ph.D. in English. She is the author of several books including Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, The Night Watch, and The Paying Guests. Fingersmith won the CWA Ellis Peters Dagger Award for Historical Crime Fiction and the South Bank Show Award for Literature. She has won a Betty Trask Award and the Somerset Maugham Award. In 2003, she was chosen as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists and was named Author of the Year by the British Book Awards, The Booksellers' Association and Waterstone's Booksellers. Several of her novels have been adapted for television.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With two brothers killed in WWI and a debt-ridden father who followed them to the grave soon afterward, 27-year-old spinster Frances Wray knows that she and her mother must take in lodgers (euphemistically described as "paying guests") to maintain their large house in a genteel section of London. In the postwar social landscape of England in 1922, the rise of a new middle class and the dwindling of the old servant class are disrupting longtime patterns of life. The disruptions occasioned by the advent of their tenants, the lower-class couple Leonard and Lilian Barber, are minor at first. But as Frances observes the tensions in the Barbers' marriage and develops a sexual attraction for the beautiful Lily, who soon reciprocates her love, a fraught and dangerous situation develops. Lost in the passion of mutual ardor, Frances and Lily scheme to create a life together. An accidental murder they commit derails their plans and transforms the novel, already an absorbing character study, into an expertly paced and gripping psychological narrative. When an innocent man is arrested for the women's crime, they face a terrible moral crisis, marked by guilt, shame, and fear. Readers of Waters's previous novels know that she brings historical eras to life with consummate skill, rendering authentic details into layered portraits of particular times and places. Waters's restrained, beautiful depiction of lesbian love furnishes the story with emotional depth, as does the suspense that develops during the tautly written murder investigation and ensuing trial. When Frances and Lily confront their radically altered existence, the narrative culminates in a breathtaking denouement. British writer Waters (The Little Stranger) deserves a large audience. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
An exquisitely tuned exploration of class in post-Edwardian Britainwith really hot sex. It's 1922, and Frances Wray lives with her mother in a big house in a genteel South London neighborhood. Her two brothers were killed in the war and her father died soon after, leaving behind a shocking mess of debt. The solution: renting out rooms to Leonard and Lilian Barber, members of the newly emerging "clerk class," the kind of people the Wrays would normally never mix with but who now share their home. Tension is high from the first paragraph, as Frances waits for the new lodgers to move in: "She and her mother had spent the morning watching the clock, unable to relax." The first half of the book slowly builds the suspense as Frances falls for the beautiful and passionate Lilian, and teases at the question of whether she will declare her love; when she does, the tension grows even thicker, as the two bump into each other all over the house and try to find time alone for those vivid sex scenes. The second half, as in an Ian McEwan novel, explores the aftermath of a shocking act of violence. Waters is a master of pacing, and her metaphor-laced prose is a delight; when Frances and Lilian go on a picnic, "the eggs [give] up their shells as if shrugging off cumbersome coats"just like the women. As life-and-death questions are answered, new ones come up, and until the last page, the reader will have no idea what's going to happen. Waters keeps getting better, if that's even possible after the sheer perfection of her earlier novels. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
IN SARAH WATERS'S previous and much-acclaimed novels, whether they're set in the Victorian period ("Tipping the Velvet") or in the 1940s ("The Night Watch"), the tectonic plates beneath the storytelling are formed by British society - how its attitudes shift, how they don't. Along class lines. About lesbian sex. Concerning the place of women. Waters's latest novel, "The Paying Guests," provides her with a fresh patch of the past - the London of 1922, a city with quite a bit of the stuffing knocked out of it. In Frances Wray's family alone, two brothers have been lost in the recent war. Her father has also passed on, leaving behind a nasty stack of debts. Facing these reduced circumstances, Frances, at 26, has given up her girlfriend in the heart of the city, as well as her plans to throw herself into the 1920s that are roaring by without her in London. Instead she finds herself duty-bound to remain in the suburbs, keeping house and cooking for her mother, tasks previously performed by servants. A shared conceit is that, at 55, Mrs. Wray is unable to lift a dust cloth herself. Or boil an egg. Frances imagines her mother's stunned behavior in the kitchen, where "she might have been a passenger on a stricken liner who'd just been bundled into the engine room and told to man the gauges." Considerately, Frances saves the heavier work for times when Mrs. Wray is out of the house and won't have to witness her daughter's struggles. This housekeeping is a grim, relentless business. Lunch might be a "cauliflower cheese" and dinner some skirt of beef beaten tender with a rolling pin, then the next day pulled out of the meat safe (whatever that is, it can't be good) for leftovers and run through a mincer. Wallpaper has to be varnished (don't ask me why). Skirting boards need daily dusting. An outhouse is also part of this frugal domestic picture. As is reading by a window on the west side of the house to use up the last bit of daylight before turning on a lamp. But these economies haven't been enough. And so the Wrays have made a separate apartment upstairs to rent to "paying guests." The lodgers who turn up are Leonard and Lilian Barber. Like Frances, they are in their 20s, but from a lower social rung. Len clerks at an insurance firm in the city. Lilian stays home, loung- ing about and making herself attractive in a tarty way. She dresses in a panorama of whimsical clothing - Japanese wrappers and Turkish slippers - and decorates their rooms by "adding lengths of beading and swaths of macramé and lace to picture rails and mantelpieces, arranging ostrich feathers in jars." In her spare time, she reads "Anna Karenina" and smokes. She has a tambourine. As she and Frances pass, time and again, on the landing - one bored, the other oppressed - the air begins to thicken with possibility. Soon enough they're picnicking in the park, then kissing in the hall, then pressing each other against the scullery tub in the middle of the night, hitching up nightgowns. Waters's sex scenes are meticulously detailed, a practice that seems, regrettably, to have gone slightly by the wayside in literary fiction. The erotic passages in this novel offer an argument for reviving the art. The affair steams along. The lovers play out a fantasy-based romance. But then reality arrives, as it will, with its dampening effect. Lilian turns out to be pregnant, with no interest in a baby she would then have to care for. She is no stranger to this predicament, though, and confidently sets off to a sketchy pharmacy to get some pills that will eliminate the problem. No muss, no fuss. What ensues, however, is grisly and in this matter, as well, Waters spares the reader none of the details. What was a bedroom when Len left for the office has become a field hospital by the time he returns. When he finds out why his wife looks like death, why no doctor has been called and why Frances is the sole member of Lilian's medical team, an unpleasant argument arises, one that winds up with Lilian seriously whacking him with a standing ashtray. When, the next morning, Len is found dead on a garden path, the police cast a wide net for suspects and witnesses, inevitably including Frances and Lilian. Events conspire to separate the lovers. Lilian goes back to live with her mother and sisters. After Len's funeral, Lilian, wedged in the back of a family car, "put up a gloved hand to the glass, she might have been gazing hopelessly out at her, Frances thought, through flowing water; she might have been drowning." From there, the plot is constructed of not always probable nuts screwed onto not terribly likely bolts - an investigation, an arrest, a trial, a verdict - with new developments at every turn. But we've seen this movie before. Much more interesting are Frances' emotions - raised like the hair on one's arm in a cold room - as she moves from a life of no interest at all to one with way too much. Although Waters is definitely up to constructing a big, entertaining story, her strength seems to be in blueprinting social architecture in terms of its tiniest corners and angles, matters measurable by inches rather than feet - small moments we recognize but have never articulated, even to ourselves. One such arrives when the Barbers are moving in, with a borrowed van and a helpful friend, and Frances comes through the front garden: "The Barbers turned, and greeted her through the tail of their laughter - so that the laughter, not very comfortably, somehow attached itself to her." The story is laid out along serious lines - postwar hard times, forbidden love, murder, justice - but it is equally a comic novel. The ridiculous martyrdom of Frances' chores. The tackiness of Lilian's wardrobe and décor. The mesmerizing ghastliness of her relatives. From Lilian's mother, Frances hears "stories of other family catastrophes. Hard confinements there'd been plenty of, sudden deaths, maulings, scaldings. A Midlands cousin had got her scalp torn off by a loom." Perhaps Waters's most impressive accomplishment is the authentic feel she achieves, that the telling - whether in its serious, exciting, comic or sexy passages - has no modern tinge. Not just that no one heats up the cauliflower cheese in a microwave or sends a text message, but that the story appears not merely to be about the novel's time but to have been written by someone living in that time, thumping out the whole thing on a manual typewriter. Lovers play out a fantasy-based romance. Then reality arrives, with its dampening effect. CAROL ANSHAW'S most recent novel is "Carry the One."
Library Journal Review
In 1922 London, newly widowed Mrs. Wray has the genteel manners and spacious manse common to her social set. But there isn't enough money for her and her spinster daughter, Frances, to live on, so they must take in lodgers. Enter the Barbers, a married couple who are looking to move up the social ladder. What sounds like a Jane Austen setup quickly segues from clashing manners to building sexual tension between Frances and the beautiful Lilian Barber. Waters (Tipping the Velvet) leads listeners through hidden trysts, murderous plans, and a breathtaking courtroom denouement. This is a tale soaked in atmosphere and blessed with Waters's gimlet eye toward social (pre)tensions. Stage veteran Juliet Stevenson delivers a smartly paced, perceptive narration. VERDICT Recommended. ["For fans of complex historical crime fiction with a strong sense of dread," read the review of the Riverhead hc, LJ 7/14.]-Kelly Sinclair, Temple P.L., TX (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.