Sarah Waters is a tease, but it’s hard not to love her. In her third novel, Fingersmith, the British author once again immerses us in her version of the Victorian English underworld for a bawdy, often thrilling adventure. But as was true of her brilliant debut, Tipping the Velvet, and the slightly disappointing follow-up, Affinity, this is much more than a lesbian updating of Dickens. Ever the conjurer, Waters can’t resist skewing the fog-drenched scenery somewhat. As in those other romantic adventures, nobody turns out to be who we thought they’d be, and neither is the world ever exactly what we’d imagined.
Perhaps readers should expect such turns from Waters by now. In her debut, after all, the oyster-girl protagonist falls for a music-hall performer and joins her on the road where gender, class, and even their names are shed as easily as costumes. In Affinity, a similar shift in identity takes place, though the slipperiest relationship proves to be between reality and perception, as an emotionally fragile heroine narrates a story we may come to distrust long before the book’s final, heartbreaking betrayal. In Fingersmith, however, Waters winks at us right away, inviting us into its world of pickpockets, fences, and baby farmers with its knowing opening line, " My name, in those days, was Susan Trinder. " By way of explaining who she is, the young Sue, as she’s called, reminisces about seeing Oliver Twist in the theater as a young child and her panic over the murder, in the play, of the " poor girl Nancy. " Since Sue is being raised in a house of thieves (a/k/a " fingersmiths " ) not unlike the crew young Twist falls in with, this hint of danger should suffice. Readers would do well to remember the fate of other Dickens characters, however, if they seek a clue to the adventures to come.
These escapades start up soon, with the arrival of the con man known as " Gentleman " because of his dapper appearance. Like so many other elements of Sue’s world, Gentleman’s finery is assumed: " the rings and the watch were snide, and the jewel a paste one; but they were damn fine counterfeits. " These are honest deceptions, by Sue’s standards, and the Gentleman’s reputation for honor among his thieving colleagues is golden. A member of the house’s inner circle, he has come to the fingersmith " family " with a grand scheme to secure a fortune, but he needs Sue to help him. Unwillingly she goes along with his plan, agreeing to pose as a lady’s maid in a secluded country estate. There she’s supposed to insinuate herself into the good graces of the owner’s seemingly innocent niece, Miss Maud Lilly, but her actions become real as she finds her feelings toward the young heiress becoming warmer and confused. " She was sweet, she was kind, she was everything that was gentle and handsome and good, " Sue says to herself. " But . . . I was the daughter of a murderess. I had expectations. " Need it be said that Sue is falling in love, or that the world as she understands it will soon be turned upside down?
The convolutions through which Waters leads her readers fill these 500-odd pages breathlessly and without her resorting to excessive Dickensian verbiage. Which is not to say that this is a sparse book: Waters’s language, as she shifts from Sue’s voice to those of other characters and back again, is redolent with the slang of the period, and her own descriptions are saturated with local color. From her first images of Sue’s London home ( " It was never quite dark there, and never quite still " ) to those of the Lilly estate ( " rising vast and straight and stark out of the woolly fog " ), this is nearly the language of the period, rich in imagery and appropriately gothic. The horrors Waters evokes, from a woman’s insane asylum to a public hanging, chill as convincingly as much-bloodier contemporary fiction. When she veers off from her better-known precedents as her heroine discovers her true sexual nature, she does so in the voice of the period. Even the words Sue cries out in ecstasy, " You pearl, you pearl, you pearl, " evoke the erotica of the era (notably the title of the Victorian erotic journal The Pearl).
Waters comes by her verisimilitude honestly, having written a PhD thesis on gay and lesbian historic fiction. The pornography cited by her characters is all, she notes in her acknowledgments, real (and publishing references are provided). But it’s the full-bodied writing rather than any background research that makes this work sweat and breathe and flush. Fingersmith is a fantasy, a romantic adventure designed to transport its readers to another time. And the appeal of Sue and Maud is as hard to resist as that of any of the rogues who seduce them.
