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Fingersmith (Book Review)
by Kristin Scott
Contributing Writer
Copyright © 2002, Columbia Chronicle
From Sarah Waters, the author of New York Times Notable Book Tipping the Velvet and award-winning Affinity, comes another spellbinding Victorian noir. Her third novel, Fingersmith, pilfers its title from 19th-century British slang for “pickpocket.” In Fingersmith, Waters shatters all clichés of lesbian fiction and weaves a sophisticated, gothic tale of romance and Dickensian conspiracy, in which every house is one of imprisonment.
Sue Trinder, an orphan in London's slum underworld, is lovingly raised by the baby-farming Mrs. Sucksby. One evening, “Gentleman,” a well-known but mannerly charlatan, proposes an elaborate criminal scheme to Sue, requiring her to travel into the country and play maid to the young and seemingly naïve Maud Lilly. Maud is confined to a ramshackle mansion with her sadistically debauched uncle. Sue's mission is to persuade Maud, heiress to a fortune upon marriage, to elope with “Gentleman,” aka Richard Rivers.
Once married, Rivers will commit his new bride to a mental asylum and divvy up the inheritance with Sue. In a setting that seems to come straight out of Mayhew's East End, Fingersmith is reminiscent of sensationalist literature of the 1860s. Just as the triple-decker 19th-century novel has three volumes, the book has three sections. Sue's point of view begins and ends the novel, while the middle chapter provides Maud's remarkably different perspective on the same story.
Waters sets an enigmatic tone from the beginning with a Shakespearean play-within-a-play device, as young Sue watches with horror as Bill Sykes violently kills Nancy in a theatrical version of Oliver Twist. What she doesn't understand until later is that it's just a play. The reader is similarly perplexed, never quite knowing who is telling the truth, or who has what agenda and why. Even the lead character Sue says, “When I try 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.”
In the book, somewhat superfluous textual twists and turns cause the reader to temporarily suffer from narrative-vertigo. Waters, however, creates sensational moments taut with such delightful dread, which once released, hurls the reader into an almost ethereal ending. Yet like an almost flawless soufflé, Waters' witty and seductive prose is as deliciously sublime as her characters are rich.
Fingersmith
by Sarah Waters
Riverhead Books
516 pages
$25.95
* Columbia Chronicle website link no longer available, so this is an exact replication of the original published piece as it appeared online. The piece was also published in hardcopy print.  |
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