Sarah Waters: Fingersmith

By MARGIE THOMSON

Sarah Waters was the surprise hit of last year's Auckland Writers Festival, and her particular brand of Victorian gothic, lesbian storytelling has gained an audience far more mainstream than that tag suggests.

Tipping the Velvet caused an additional sensation by coming wrapped in cellophane with a warning sticker on its front cover but, while that novel, the subsequent Affinity, and now Fingersmith contain a portion of steamy lesbian passion in scenes that would make Charles Dickens, at least, flush rosily, the sex is not the main thing. Really.

Waters is better at complex plotting than just about anyone, and her novels are fantastic constructions of not only the usual things - vivid characters, gripping story, wonderful settings, realistic dialogue - but also of the Victorian underworld.

Tipping the Velvet took place in the mysterious, gender-bending and thoroughly disreputable world of vaudeville; Affinity in the dark salons of the spiritualists. Fingersmith is set in the world of thieves and crooks.

The main characters are con artists, every one, but the matter of who is conning who is at the heart of this tricky novel. And if there's one thing you can be sure of as Waters' stories unfold, there will be twists and shocks aplenty.

Waters has a doctorate in historical gay and lesbian fiction, and her expertise is apparent not only in the attention to detail and arcane knowledge with which she brings this world to life, but in the literary references littering the story.

Her writing has often been compared to Dickens, and here it is as if she is having a quiet joke with the idea: not only is Oliver Twist mentioned on the first page, but her characters have names which could have seen them happily within the pages of a Dickens' novel: Mrs Sucksby, who farms babies for a living; fearsome, huge Nurse Bacon, Mrs Cakebread the cook.

The story opens in London's borough, in the childhood home of the narrator Susan Trinder. An orphan whose mother, she believes, was hanged for murder soon after her birth, Susan has been reared lovingly by the rather Fagin-like Mrs Sucksby - a powerful woman who lords it over the household laundering operation, whereby "poke" (ill-gotten gains) comes in the front door, is bargained for by "locksmith" Mr Ibbs, transformed, and leaves by the backdoor to be passed on through the dark alleyways of London.

"Everything that came into our kitchen looking like one sort of thing, was made to leave it again looking quite another," Susan tells us.

She is illiterate, but skilled in other ways: shining stolen brass; washing and pressing silks and linens to make them look like new; shining up gems; disguising "bad" coins to make them look like the real thing.

Seventeen now, she thinks she'll probably marry "to a thief or a fencing man", and farm babies like her adored Mrs Sucksby. But then one night (and it is a dark and stormy night, although Waters doesn't put it quite like that), handsome young Richard Rivers (known to the borough as "Gentleman" for his "swell" way of speaking) comes knocking at Mrs Sucksby's door, to tell the household of his plans to marry a young, orphaned heiress whose uncle he is working for. It's a vicious plan of trickery, theft and betrayal, and he has come to request Susan's help.

The heiress, Maud Lilly, requires a new maid, and Gentleman wants Susan to take the job, work to convince Maud to marry him, and for her assistance he will pay her £3000 - an unimaginable fortune for a girl more used to thinking in pennies.

Susan, imbued in the petty criminal underworld, agrees to the plan and soon after leaves for her new job at the large house, called Briar, 40 miles outside London.

What she isn't prepared for is her sympathy for her new employer, and the young women - who fit together like parts of a jigsaw, one streetwise, hardened and yet illiterate; the other seemingly soft and naive, unable even to dress herself, who spends her days in the world of books - slowly develop an intimacy that wasn't in the plan.

The life at Briar is no less dark and morally gloomy than the borough, but where at least in London there was a sense of belonging and love, Briar seems devoid of human warmth.

Maud's uncle, her guardian for whom Gentleman is working as a cataloguer, is a cadaverous, impatient and brutal man who is compiling an index of a particular kind of book, the nature of which is part of the unfolding mystery.

Suffice to say, the layers of immorality and corruption deepen, and the sense of fear is drawn as tight as a corset. Nothing is as it seems, and even though we think we're in on the truth, our knowledge proves, like all else in this Dickensian world, to be counterfeit.

Maud herself, commenting on the way she believes Susan perceives her, says: "I have grown used to thinking of myself as a sort of book. Now I feel myself a book, as books must seem to her: she looks at me with her unreading eyes, sees the shape, but not the meaning of the text. She marks the white flesh - 'Ain't you pale!' she says - but not the quick, corrupted blood beneath."

The first part of the book ends with a stunning revelation; it's then back to square one, through the eyes of Maud, who now takes her turn as narrator, relating the same events that Susan has just been through, but from quite a different point of view. A risky device, but nevertheless the story's tension is expertly held and developed, our understanding deepened - and so on into the third and final part, when Susan returns to finish the story.

Fate, deceit, the dangers of love - all these things twist through multiple locales, from slum to gentry, mental asylum to pornographic bookshops, through the hysterical crowds on hanging day at the Horsemonger Lane Gaol.

This is a dark, twisted world Waters paints, where one character is forced to admit that "it's love, not scorn, not malice; only love - that makes me harm her, in the end".

Melodramatic, certainly. But, at more than 500 pages, this is a hugely entertaining treat of a novel that will keep the light on long past bedtime.

Virago

$44.95