This is the rare novel that leaves the reader unsure of its ending till the very last pages, fomenting twist after twist, some at least partially suspected (by Frances and readers alike), others shocking everyone.īut “The Paying Guests” offers more than love, sex, death, detectives, and Frances’s agonized ruminations thereupon (though, really, what more could you want?). If the signal question in the first section is when (will the lovers finally come together), the question for the last part is what (on earth is going to happen). In winking homage to the cliff-hanging, three-volume 19th-century novel - one of many signs of the Victorian legacy that hangs heavy over Frances - Waters ends part one of “The Paying Guests’’ with love, part two with death, then shifts in part three to slippery mystery. Although she is at first disturbed by their “odd, unintimate proximity,” Frances becomes increasingly intimate with the Barbers, progressing from eavesdropping obsessively on their domestic sounds (Waters is a virtuoso of the domestic lives and spaces of the past) to sharing their gin and more. Why indeed? Because the new Sarah Waters novel, which finds the author at the height of her powers, weaves her characteristic threads of historical melodrama, lesbian romance, class tension, and sinister doings into a fabric of fictional delight that alternately has the reader flipping pages as quickly as possible, to find out what happens next, and hesitating to turn the page, for fear of what will happen next.Įnter the paying guests: jaunty aspirational clerk Leonard Barber and his short-skirted, lipsticked wife, Lilian, bringing bric-a-brac and gin into the upstanding Wray home. Wray’s treasured antiques, which have turned out to be “Victorian fakes” Frances’s own “false, bright way”? And why is Mr. Barber’s “ ‘refined’ elocution-class accents” the “dishonesty” of the “patched” house the late Mr. Why is the genteel Frances Wray doing housework, and why have she and her mother taken in lodgers, albeit in the most refined way (as Frances tells a friend, “We call them paying guests, on Champion Hill”)? Why is everything fake: Mr. From the first pages of “The Paying Guests,’’ it’s clear that something is up.
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