March 2, Coeur de Lion
The Paying Guests Sarah Waters. 020323
As there was such a wide range of comments about this novel, the following is simply an (almost ) verbatim smattering of readers’ experience - and, after all, the writer having done her work it’s the reader who passes judgement.
A Marmite novel:
• …got so fed up with the 'Chick lit' story line….childish tosh……sounds like Enid Blyton….the characters were two-dimensional and … the book was very boring.
• …experienced mixed feelings, ended up not liking very much… about twice as long as necessary …despite Sarah Waters’ undoubted literary talents and rigorous research into the period … finding it in parts exploitative and unnecessarily sensationalist.
• … long …maybe a bit too easy to read, and too simplistic……a good but not brilliant read
• A long book…I struggled with at first….the first half oppressive, pernickety and debilitating. I had to stop reading it for a while as found it so stultifying. But the sheer quality of the writing won me back
• …struck the right notes
• …thought it was very good…. excellent descriptions
• Enjoyable…some excellent writing, good storyline and well defined characters….probably a little over long.
• … enjoyed this book a lot…. well-written, with well-drawn characters, both major and minor.
The period setting (1922)
• They live in a rapidly decaying relatively large house in a well-established, comfortable middle-class road, Champion Hill, in South London.
• Set against the social and economic aftermath of WW1 from a woman’s perspective…with themes of class and gender
• liked the period detail and what life must have been like in the aftermath of the First World War. It also underlined how elderly people were! – Frances’s mother “ now, at fifty-five, she had the white head of an old lady” and was “simply tired and elderly”!
• The details are all there - the casual smoking, scalding the milk to keep it from souring, the class divide personified by the Barbers extended family.
• … post-war South London suburbia with all its pettiness, little routines and memories was powerful and authentic but incredibly debilitating…. This rather gloomy world was not helped by descriptions of thwarted love and limited options for anyone outside the norm..
• the contrast between the old middle class and the new so-called clerk class with a more energetic approach and a different set of values….highlights the class differences that were beginning to change after the First World War, the way in which working class suspects of crimes work given less protection and legal defence than those who are better off and the challenge of living as a gay person in a very traditional society.
• One of the striking things was how important and ever-present ‘class’ was, and the ubiquity of people of that class having servants
• There were a lot of details which I especially enjoyed. The early parts, where the paying guests arrived and the impact their presence had on the house, was incredibly reminiscent of my own childhood.
• … the references to old houses….the outside loos… and geysers, I remember them my grandmothers’ houses
• …the settings were beautifully described in the slightly dilapidated house that mother and daughter had left from the father who had not looked after their money well,
The protagonists:
• “She was all warm colour and curve. How well she filled her own skin! She might have been poured generously into it, like treacle.”
• There was lots of internal thinking from Francis which enriches the book and gives a much deeper appreciation of what she was living through. Some would say maybe there was a bit too much of this.
• …while the character of Lil was painted clearly and brightly, I found it harder to visualise Frances - all the description she shared of herself was down-beat, dowdy and put-upon by constant household chores. It was difficult to imagine what it was that drew Lil to Frances, other than the need for more interesting company than Len could provide.
• …not sure about Frances – I increasingly came to worry about her as the central voice in the narrative. She was an unreliable narrator. She was different and maybe difficult , as her mother said “what a fight you’ve made of everything” – she was never at ease with herself or her life.
• No likeable men - apart from some of the dead ones. Len particularly conveniently unpleasant.
• One thing that struck me was how young both two female protagonists were with a 26 year old already being described as a spinster. The mother who simply would not have been that old in modern terms comes across as someone with a very limited life and not in the best of health. This shows how much we have changed in terms of the life experience of people both in their 20s and in their 50s.
The love story:
• …the love affair was delicately and rather beautifully described, and made very real to me.
• …some lovely descriptions of the burgeoning attraction between Frances and Lillian and the consummation in a sexual relationship.
• The whole dancing at the party and what happened afterwards was very erotic and well done ….the long build-up to the kiss
• The sexual tension was beautifully captured and the sex scenes were graphic but not at all gross
• The love affair was so short lived before it was shattered. It needed to celebrated as a “glorious, a gift, to be enjoyed as long as it lasted” . But in reality, over the summer, it became “ever more tearing, ever more consuming, ever more frustrating
The Tragic Events:
• And then it all went horribly wrong and for a while I was drawn in to reading about the appalling attempts to abort the child, the murder and the effort to cover it up.
• One of the most interesting things … linking this book to Russian Literature…..Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment …. where undertaking the crime is not that difficult, but where the guilt then starts to make the murderer feel more and more impelled to volunteer their own guilt
• …my primary unease with the book, or the second half at least, was that, despite the ‘excuses’ presented in the book (self-defence, unbearable provocation, etc), Frances and Lil either committed or were inextricably involved in a murder, and they spent a substantial part of the book trying to get away with it. I felt that, back in 1922, a woman of Frances’ upbringing and background would have had a very strong moral code, which would have made it much more difficult justify her actions
• As I reflect back on this book, I am uncertain what it was really about: was it a moral story about how a murderer gets away with murder: or a historical novel exploring the social mores of the 1920s; or is it a cautionary story of the consequences of adultery; or was it just the story of a failing love affair. Maybe all of these…
Scores:
WM 8.5 , SC 5, JH 6.25, MW 6, MT 7, AA 7 (prov), RV 8.75, CB 8.25 , CW 4Avge: 6.75
