Affinity (1999)

Well-written, engaging, and with a plot twist at the very end to satisfy. I enjoyed this so much more than Tipping The Velvet. Less sex, to be sure (i.e. no sex), but also less blatant Victorian lesbian erotica copying. ( )

Not as good as Fingersmith or Tipping the Velvet. Tipping the Velvet is really the best book she has written. ( )

taylor

The setting is London in the year 1874. Margaret Prior, a young woman from a wealthy family, has decided to become a “Lady Visitorâ€ù to the women’s ward at Millbank Prison. She is a deeply unhappy person, grief-stricken by her father’s death and bristling under life with her overbearing mother. The hope is that her charity-work will help with her recovery from a suicide attempt.

Margaret meets with the usual thieves and prostitutes but is particularly drawn to an enigmatic prisoner named Selina Dawes. Selina, she learns, is a spiritualist serving time after her last séance resulted in the death of her benefactress. Margaret gradually becomes obsessed with Selina and convinced of her innocence. As we read her increasingly desperate journal entries, we see Margaret cast the young woman as her savior, and herself as Selina’s.

Sarah Waters’ characters do silly things, selfish things, and even cruel things. But there is usually some redeeming quality that stops me from hating them entirely. Unfortunately the main character here is such a dipshit that I could not bring myself to care about her. At all. Just a disclaimer here, I do understand what a serious condition depression is. However, Margaret is the kind of person who wants everyone to be as miserable as she is. For instance, she insists on wearing mourning clothes at her sister's wedding. That has nothing to do with depression and everything to do with being a bitch.

I also disliked that the story boiled down to belief vs. skepticism. Either you think Selina is the real deal, or you think she is a con artist and spend the entire book waiting for the big reveal. Waters tries to keep it ambiguous by including excerpts from Selina’s own journal, but I found these passages unnecessary as well as illogical. Margaret never reads this journal. It was not presented at Serena’s trial, otherwise there would be no doubt about her guilt. And for God’s sake, if you are a con artist, why would you write your secrets down where anyone could read them? I guess Affinity itself is like a magic trick: depending on how cynical you are, you will see only what you want to see, and that will determine whether you see the ending coming or not. ( )

Over 50% in basically nothing has happened and there's no trajectory or sense of where it's going. ( )