It’s
1862 in the Borough, at the heart of a London thick
with fog and thieves. Sue Trinder is a 17-year-old orphan
who was left in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a baby farmer,
fence and crime boss. Mrs. Sucksby has kept her close, as
if she were her own daughter, and Sue knows of little beyond
Lant Street and petty thievery. All of this changes, however,
when Richard Rivers, a trickster and confidence man known
to Sue and the others as Gentleman, comes up with a plan
that will make them all rich.
Maud
Lilley is also 17, an heiress kept in seclusion by her uncle
at Briar, a large house 40 miles west of London. She is
set to inherit her mother’s fortune of £40,000
on marriage. Gentleman’s plan is to marry her, have
her committed to a mental asylum and then take her fortune.
But he needs an accomplice, a girl to act as chaperone while
he courts Maud, and this is where Sue comes in. She will
become Maud's maid, help win her over, and then help get
her committed, for which she’ll receive £3000.
Simple.
Except
nothing is ever as simple as it might appear.
Once
installed as Maud’s maid, Sue takes pleasure
in looking after her, starts to feel sorry for this strange,
lonely, other-worldly girl, and then finds she’s falling
in love with her. She grows to hate Gentleman, and despise
herself, but things have gone too far to back out. There
is no way she can return to Lant Street and Mrs. Sucksby
empty handed. Sad as Sue is about it, Maud’s fate
is as good as sealed.
Except
no one is quite as they appear, and the boundaries between
predator and prey--and between innocence (in all its definitions)
and guilt--turn out to be blurred.
Fingersmith
has been written in the best tradition of the “sensation”
novels of the 1860s, sharing many of the attributes of works
by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins: dastardly “gentlemen,”
unscrupulous villains, vulnerable girls in peril, and transgressive
heroines who, as the author put it herself, only “need
a little nudge to do wonderfully lesbian things.”
It is a tightly plotted, high octane story that pulls you
along at such a pace, you barely have time to catch your
breath.
But
this is no carbon-copy Victorian novel, it's a work of contemporary
fiction. Not just because it contains strong language and
sex scenes that would’ve made studying English literature
far more interesting; stylistically, it has a modern feel.
There is an overlapping, dual-viewpoint narrative, and scenes
are set quickly for an audience used to film editing, doing
away with the huge chunks of exposition you’d find
in a Dickens or Collins work.
Fingersmith
is a superbly crafted novel, and it’s no surprise
that it was short-listed for the Booker, Britain’s
top literary prize.
Nothing
illustrates better how far we've come in the UK
since I was a teenager than the fact that you can
walk into a mainstream bookshop and see Sarah Waters's novels
on open display, and then watch adaptations of them at prime
time on a Sunday evening, and have them receive critical
acclaim rather than public outcry.
Sarah
Waters is one of a rare breed: an unashamedly lesbian
writer who has enjoyed mainstream crossover success. She
is happy to admit that her books have lesbian content because
that’s what interests her. Fingersmith is
only her third novel; Waters is such a natural and talented
storyteller, she’ll continue to write books that people
look forward to for a long time to come.
Now
go and read Fingersmith. You won't regret it.
Get
Fingersmith in paperback
