The Paying Guests (2014)

Det tog extremt lång tid för mig att läsa den här boken, vilket kan ha dragit ner betyget något. Långsam början, mycket bra mitten och sen tacklade den av mot slutet igen. Waters är aldrig dålig, men detta är inte hennes bästa. ( )

I stopped reading this - it's just not my kind of book. ( )

Sarah Waters crafts some of the most wonderful love stories I've ever read. She is a master at capturing all the emotional - and physical - ripples that come when you fall for someone. On the other hand, the crime aspect falls flat. I maybe would have liked if the book was a "whydunit" or if there were more twists, like a typical crime story. While the first two thirds is very romantic, the last third deals with the main character's guilt, which is not very engaging or sympathetic. ( )

Camberwell, 1922. Frances Wray and her mother lead a lonely life in a house which has become too big for them, too costly to maintain. The death of Frances's two brothers and her father during the Great War still casts a shadow over the household. To make ends meet, the Wrays have to take in lodgers or "paying guests". Horror of horrors! What will the neighbours say? The arrival of Leonard and Lilian Barber will indeed have far-reaching consequences, very different from those feared by the Wrays...

I have read all Waters's works and none has disappointed me so far. This has come very close. I squarely blame the blurbs on the cover for this. Let's start with the claim that the book is "unputdownable" and "page-turning". Well, the first 200 pages or so were quite soporific. Well-written by all means and definitely finely crafted. But not "unputdownable" in my understanding of the word. In fact, I decided to take a break from the novel, and read two or three others before returning to it.

Things pick up when the relationships (and tensions) between the Wrays and the Barbers develop. But we're still far from the wild ride of "Fingersmith" or "Affinity". In its second and third parts, the novel moves into the crime territory and suddenly Waters builds up the tension. Yes, the novel does become page-turning, but only out of the build-up of curiousity as to how the narrative will wrap up - John Grisham style. Ironically, Lauren Owen's historical vampire novel [b:The Quick|18050175|The Quick|Lauren Owen|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1391414209s/18050175.jpg|25332934] (admittedly a very different sort of book) was slated by many critics for exactly these same type of gear/genre changes.

Waters has been praised for her powers of observation and for her use of the "domestic novel" to probe at the social divisions inherent in the world she portrays. One critic compared her to Zola and Flaubert. Yes, the novel is successful from this point of view. But let's not forget that friction between different social classes and communities has been a recurring subject in all her novels. And one might argue that it's more challenging to address such a social theme within the genre strictures of a ghost story (as she did in The Little Stranger) than in a ... social novel about class friction in 1920s London.

A related problem is the fact that, perhaps because of its very genre, the novel contains long sections of dialogue. Waters does a good job at crafting a pastiche of the style of the era - but this makes long passages of the book read as if it were a Downton Abbey script. I preferred the third-person passages, where a striking metaphor or turn of phrase would remind me of why I love reading this author.

Another critic praised Waters for "not being afraid of being explicit". There are indeed some sexually charged scenes, but her most transgressive novel to date is her very first one - Tipping the Velvet. Nothing new here.

So why do I give this novel a decent three stars? Because notwithstanding my doubts about the book, it contains many hallmarks of Waters's style. Because, despite the longueurs and fact that it could have done with some editing, some passages are truly gripping. Because if I hadn't been led to expect a "masterpiece", a "perfect novel" and "Sarah Waters's best novel to date" I might have simply enjoyed it for what it is. ( )

I liked the writing style, but not Francis. ( )