“Affinity” by Sarah Waters
An upper-class woman recovering from a suicide attempt, Margaret Prior has begun visiting the women’s ward of Millbank prison, Victorian London’s grimmest jail, as part of her rehabilitative charity work. Amongst Millbank’s murderers and common thieves, Margaret finds herself increasingly fascinated by an apparently innocent inmate, the enigmatic spiritualist Selina Dawes.
Selina was imprisoned after a séance she was conducting went horribly awry, leaving an elderly matron dead and a young woman deeply disturbed. Although initially skeptical of Selina’s gifts, Margaret is soon drawn into a twilight world of ghosts and shadows, unruly spirits and unseemly passions, until she is at last driven to concoct a desperate plot to secure Selina’s freedom, and her own.
I started this book and quickly resolved myself to the fact I really wasn’t going to enjoy it.
By the time I reached the climax, I couldn’t stop reading.
This was a book it took me a little while to get into. Clearly emulating the dense, gothic style of the period it is set in, it starts off rather impenetrable. But once I pushed myself through, I found the characters and story emerged, making Affinity an incredible pleasure to read.
After finishing the book, it struck me that there is a lot in common between this book and the works of Susan Hill. They both go for the same pseudo-Victorian, gothic style. Only Waters work is a lot deeper, with more context and meaning, whereas Hill’s stories are simpler and clearer. I think the best way to put it is that Waters’ story is what Hill’s stories want to be when they grow up.
It took about 30 pages for me to get into Affinity. It threatened at first to be one of those literary novels where the language is all that matters to the author, and story and character are forgotten. But Waters is, luckily, a much better writer than that. I don’t know if the writing got clearer, or my brain managed to move onto the correct track to take it in, but all that matters is I became engrossed.
Once I got my brain in the correct mindset, the writing was beautiful and flowing. Written in the voice of the protagonist, it embodies the repression and hopeless longing of an intellectual, gay woman trapped in a time when such a life was not accepted. Waters manages to keep Margaret pushing against convention just the correct amount to make us root for her. She is no "plucky heroine", and when she pulls back, failing to fight against the things that restrict her, it feels natural.
Waters is also a master of showing not telling. Especially in how she gives out the backstory. There is so much in Margaret’s history that influences the action. Yet it’s left to the reader to see it, rather than having it laid out for us. In a reflection of the social values of the time, even Margaret doesn’t talk about certain things about herself out loud.
But the tension and repressed feelings saturate the pages. The only word for a lot of passages in this book is “smouldering”. Yet Waters keeps it from ever feeling cheap or smutty. We’re in a world where women are not free to express their feelings, and so much must be kept hidden.
And boy do we feel those simmering feelings.
There is not a lot of action in the story, with most of it taking place in one of two locations; Margaret's home, or Millbank Prison. In fact, looking back I’m struck by how repetitive I feel the plot should have felt. But Waters creates such a deep, conflicted world filled with relatable characters and takes us along at exactly the correct pace.
And as I said in my introduction, I couldn’t put the book down at the end. Waters swiftly and masterfully pulls all the plot threads together, including ones that had been so deftly woven through the story I hadn’t even realised they were there, that you can’t look away. I wouldn’t call it anything so blatant as a “twist”. Everything simply falls into place in a way that is both inherently satisfying and emotionally crushing.
I enjoyed Affinity, and am definitely going to look out the rest of Waters’ novels. Now I have the writing style in my head, I feel I’ll be more prepared to get into them with less effort than this one took. If I have a quibble, it's that the writing sometimes leans towards being too dense. When it suddenly became harder to get through the prose, the immersion suffered. But luckily after the opening chapters, these occurrences were few and far between.
