The Paying Guests - Sarah Waters
Published 2014
Hardback ISBN: 978 0 349 00436 5
Pages: 564
The novel is set in 1920s London, shortly after the end of WW1. The city is tense, jobless war veterans beg for money on the street and women struggle to support their-selves without the help of their husbands and sons who were killed in action. Mrs Wray and her daughter Francis live in well-to-do Champion Hill. Now that she is widowed and her sons have been killed, Mrs Wray can no longer support the house on her own. She and her daughter decide to take in lodgers who will live in the upper part of the house. Mr and Mrs Barber move in and soon make friends with Francis as they are of similar ages. Francis and Lily Barber soon become more than friends. Francis struggles to keep the relationship from her mother and Lily from her husband. As they become more involved the two struggle to balance their lives and must decide if they should boldly be together in the open or revert to their former lives.
This is very much like Sarah Waters other novels in that the setting, the period and the relationship are described wonderfully. You can really feel 1920s London. It’s a period I had not thought too much about previously. I was unaware that ex-servicemen resorted to begging, and although it seems obvious I had not considered the struggle that women now faced without the men of their families. The description is subtle, but it works tremendously well. The majority of the novel is set in the house in Champion hill. You get glimpses of London, but again, you really get a feeling of what living there would be like.
When I started reading the novel I was so engrossed that I had forgotten the kind of books that Sarah Waters writes. I was half wondering if Mr Barber and Francis were going to have an affair, before I realised that true to form, it was Mrs Barber that Francis would have the affair with. I can’t believe i didn’t see it coming. I loved the progression of the relationship. There is a lot of tension between the two. It is clear that they want to be together but struggle with the taboo of same sex relationships in this period, and of course Lily is married. You find yourself getting quite involved with the two and really routing for them.
Around half way through the novel it takes a change in direction. It becomes a crime story and Francis and Lily become entangled in a court case that has the potential to end their relationship and ruin their lives. This is where I started to lose interest in the novel. Prior to this I felt very involved and caught up in the characters lives. I felt that this split the novel in two, and the change in direction was too big a wrench away from the first half of the novel that I just began to felt frustrated. I also felt that it was all a bit obvious. What was going to happen is very strongly hinted at, so that when we get to the court case it isn’t a massive surprise. I felt that we kept being told the same things over and over again in this part. Francis and Lily can do nothing about the court case, they must just sit back and wait for it to be over. However they do meet up to talk about it. The reader is put in the same position. We of course can do nothing about the court case, and we are made to sit back and listen to Francis and Lily go over the same things, repeatedly. I did however feel quite tense about it all. I wanted everything to go alright. I think after the emotional investment you put into reading about Francis and Lily, you can’t help but hope that there will be a good ending to the novel. At the same time I was more interested in getting to the end so that this would all be over than I was about reading the book and enjoying it.
I’m fairly sure that other Sarah Waters fans will really enjoy this novel. It is quite similar to her other books in a lot of ways. I just struggled with the change of direction and the fact that this new direction didn’t seem to be going anywhere exciting. I felt like it was a shame really. I love her other books. If you are new to Sarah Waters I would recommend starting with Tipping the Velvet or The Night Watch, both of which are utterly amazing and un-put-down-able.
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