The Paying Guests

by Sarah Waters

It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned; the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa—a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants—life is about to be transformed, as impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers.

With the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the “clerk class,” the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. Little do the Wrays know just how profoundly their new tenants will alter the course of Frances’s life—or, as passions mount and frustration gathers, how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, LGBT, Historical, Book Club, Romance, Queer

566 pages, Hardcover

First published August 28, 2014

About the author

Sarah Waters is a British novelist. She is best known for her first novel, Tipping the Velvet, as well the novels that followed, including Affinity, Fingersmith, and The Night Watch.

Waters attended university, earning degrees in English literature. Before writing novels Waters worked as an academic, earning a doctorate and teaching. Waters went directly from her doctoral thesis to her first novel. It was during the process of writing her thesis that she thought she would write a novel; she began as soon as the thesis was complete.

Reviews

[La Petite Américaine · Rating 1 out of 5]

After two years of waiting for Sarah Waters' new novel to come out, reading this actually made me want to cry a little. I don't know what to say. When a book this terrible is written by an author that we know is capable of so much more, it feels like a personal affront.

After a fantastic debut and decades of decent novels, what the hell went so wrong with The Paying Guests? How could our fair Sarah do this to us?

It's all pretty simple. The problem with this book is that Sarah Waters got famous. Seriously.

Think about it.

Waters is adored in the literary world, half of her books have been turned into BBC dramas, and she's got more awards up the wazoo than Teen Mom Farrah has glass dongs up the ... nevermind. My point is, Sarah Waters is powerful enough that no one questions her any more. The New York Times, FT, and the Guardian are going to laud her no matter what she writes -- making her clean up the crap isn't worth the trouble.

And judging from The Paying Guests, no editor dared email her to let her know she was repeating herself on every goddamn page, or to suggest she rewrite some of the suckier parts.

The result is a multitude of cringe-worthy passages:

"She seemed to have lost a layer of skin, to be kissing not simply with her lips but with her nerves, her muscles, her blood." (EW).

"They smiled at each other across the table, and some sort of shift occurred between them. There was a quickening, a livening – Frances could think of nothing to compare it with save some culinary process. It was like the white of an egg growing pearly in hot water, a milk sauce thickening in the pan." (Huh? How romantic).

"It was like being parched, and touching water, like being famished, and holding food." (Sigh. Goddammit).

I'm sure some junior editor making 20 grand a year at some London publishing house wasn't about to fire off an email to the great Sarah Waters saying,

"Hi S—

Just got the feedback from the boys upstairs.

Please rework the above-mentioned passages, cut about 30 pages from the melodramatic self-induced abortion scene (it seems all you do is repeat the words "moan" and "pale" and "blood" for several pages), make it harder to see the stupid plot twist coming from 100 pages away, and narrow the last 250 pp. of legal drivel down to 75.

Also, can you go for something other than the 1920s English domestic novel? It's duller than deadly nightshade.

Finally, please give the two main characters personalities so that readers can tell them apart. Perhaps make them more lifelike--characters that readers can despise, root for, or at least care about--and less like words on the page.

Happy to receive your rewrites by Monday at 5. Cheers."

Yeah. I didn't think so.

Since the people working for her won't say anything, I will. Sarah, you're great when you try. So please try harder.

Sorry to do this to you, but...

SUCKED.

[Bonnie Brody · Rating 1 out of 5]

I struggled through this book, and I DO mean struggled. I usually finish a book within three days, even one as lengthy as this one. It took me over a week to read this novel and I did not find it enjoyable. I am new to Sarah Waters though I've had her novel, Fingersmith, recommended to me in the past.

I found The Paying Guests to be overwritten and overwrought. Frances, the protagonist, is given to internal meanderings that repeat themselves over and over again. A good third of this book could have been edited out without doing it any harm.

Frances Wray lives with her mother in a nice area of London. The setting is just after World War I. Frances's father has died a few years before and has left Frances and her mother in poor economic straits due to carelessness and poor investments. To make matters a bit easier, they take in boarders, or 'paying guests'. These boarders are Lilian and Leonard Barber, both from the 'clerk class', a little less brahmin in character than the Wrays. In London, during those times, this is important.

At one time, Frances was an activist and a feminist. She is now a 'spinster' in her twenties, helping her mother with housework and cooking. She had a lover once, a woman named Christina, who she gave up in order to stay with her mother. She is still friends with Christina who is now living with her female lover, Stevie.

Frances gradually falls for Lilian Barber and their friendship and burgeoning romance is the subject of the first and second part of the book. The book has three parts and it moves very slowly, without much action, until the end of the second part. I found myself reading and putting the book down over and over again. I picked it up each time with trepidation. Would anything ever happen?

Something does happen. However, it happens so late in the book that I was tired of it all. I just wanted it to end. By the time I finished, I felt exhausted from my reading experience.

[karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is another stunner from sarah waters, who seems to be back to her full strength after the divisive The Little Stranger. this book, to me, was nearly as good as the unbeatable Fingersmith.

this is her first novel set just post-WWI, and it is such a perfect setting for her to be writing in, considering her typical themes of gender and class. WWI was an unprecedented situation for england, with far-reaching and unforeseen consequences affecting those left behind. while the boys were off fighting, the women were left behind to pick up the slack, and were granted more employment and social opportunities than they had previously enjoyed. when the men came back, those who managed to survive the fighting, they were frequently unable to find work, and were resentful, suspicious, and frequently even violent towards women who had become almost a different species in their absence. these men didn't fit into the postwar world, they were diminished; their prospects had vanished. the end of the fighting and the return of the men affected the women, too, who had flourished in the relaxation of public scrutiny, in the different demands of a world without men, especially those women who were not looking for a husband to take care of them.

which brings us to frances. frances is adjusting to the postwar climate as best as she is able. she is unmarried, her father and brothers have died, and she and her mother's social position has altered drastically. her father's mismanagement of their finances has forced them to go without servants, leaving the household chores to frances herself. the possibilities the war offered to women like frances have evaporated, and she is as resentful as the returned soldiers, her prospects just as dried-up, her life reduced to scrubbing the floor on her hands and knees day after day. in order to bring in some money, she and her mother suffer the further humiliation of taking on boarders, or as they are more elegantly-termed, "paying guests," renting out a portion of their overlarge house to a lower-class young couple, lilian and leonard barber.

the arrival of the barbers is jarring to frances. they are young, modern, and unfettered by the genteel manners to which she is accustomed, even though she herself has had a flirtation with impropriety during the war which landed her both in jail and into the arms of another woman. but now she is on her own, trying desperately to keep up appearances for the sake of her pride and the comfort of her mother, and the barbers are a necessary evil to be endured.

what follows is a difficult period of adjustment, where the boundaries between private and public spaces blur, the most tense and awkward game of snakes & ladders ever is played, the forced intimacy of the lodgers breaks down several different types of barriers, and then something awful, horrible, terrible occurs - one of the most intensely graphic scenes i have ever read which then paves the way for a series of increasingly-precarious situations compromising all of the characters.

it's a good thing frances is so good at keeping secrets.

sarah waters is just so, so good. she has written a deeply romantic, morally complicated book that is a triumph both as historical fiction and as a character-rich psychological suspense thriller. it lacks the mind-bending loyalty-shifts that made Fingersmith such an outstandingly original work, but this stands firmly on its own, and is a definite must-read.

................................................................................................................................................


GIMMIE GIMMIE GIMMIE GIMMIE

three months later:

I HAVE IT I HAVE IT I HAVE IT

ALL MY DREAMS ARE COMING TRUE!

come to my blog!

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Barbers had said they would arrive by three. It was like waiting to begin a journey, Frances thought. She and her mother had spent the morning watching the clock, unable to relax. At half-past two she had gone wistfully over the rooms for what she’d supposed was the final time; after that there had been a nerving up, giving way to a steady deflation, and now, at almost five, here she was again, listening to the echo of her own footsteps, feeling no sort of fondness for the sparsely furnished spaces, impatient simply for the couple to arrive, move in, get it over with…”
- Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests

The title of Sarah Waters’s The Paying Guests indicates that it is a take on a robust – if quite specific – literary niche: a study of class and manners in Great Britain. It is 1922, and with the First World War having ended, and millions of ex-soldiers returning home to a collapsing economy, the formerly genteel Mrs. Wray and her daughter, Frances, are struggling to make ends meet. They live in a nice house in a good neighborhood, but the servants are all gone, and they have been forced to take in tenants – the titular “paying guests” – in order to pay the bills.

The tenants are a young married couple, Leonard and Lilian, part of an emerging middle class that threatens to upend the order of British society.

If this all sounds a bit staid and dusty, as explorations of postwar British mores tend to be, I can’t say I disagree with that assessment. You’d probably still think that, even if I told you that a love triangle involving a man and two women was involved.

The twist, however, is that it is the two women – Lilian and Frances – who are falling in love, while Leonard is the blithely unknowing third wheel.

The Paying Guests made a bit of a splash when it was published in 2014. It was, after all, a mainstream release from a major publisher that centered on a lesbian couple living in a time and place not far removed from the trial of Oscar Wilde. With my curiosity heightened by a faint patina of controversy, and the possibility of something a bit risqué, I picked this up.

The first thing that I should mention is that The Paying Guests is not in the least risqué. While the lesbian angle was widely played up during its initial release, Waters never uses the phrase, and is far more concerned with emotional entanglements than sexual identification. The second thing worth mentioning is that the first doesn’t matter. This is an awesome book.

As I noted at the top, The Paying Guests begins with Frances and her mother attempting to deal with the convulsive aftershocks of a catastrophic four-year world war. With Frances’s father and her two brothers dead, she and her mother are left to deal with the legacy of poor investments and debt.

When Lilian and Leonard enter the scene, Mrs. Wray is quite disconcerted. Like any self-respecting upper class Brit, she believes that a good name and good breeding are more important than having a profession or cash-on-hand. Initially, Frances is also unsure how to feel about the new couple in the house.

She had done her best to get it all right. But seeing Mrs. Barber going about, taking possession, determining which of her things would go here, which there, she felt oddly redundant – as if she had become her own ghost.

Later, Frances – who went through a Bohemian phase before the War, which included a girlfriend she still visits – takes a keen interest in Lillian, and the two become friends.

How little the two of them knew each other, really. They were practically strangers. She hadn’t had an inkling of Lillian’s existence until six weeks before. Now she’d catch herself thinking of her at all sorts of odd moments, always slightly surprised when she did so, able to follow the thought backward, stage by stage, link by link, this idea having been called to mind by that one, which in turn had been suggested by that… But they all had their finish at Lillian, wherever they started.

Eventually, Lillian and Frances become lovers. This would be a strained situation in any time – husband, wife, lover, all sharing the same house – but the tension is heightened by taking place in the 1920s.

I could say more, but I won’t.

As I read this, Daphne du Maurier’s classic Rebecca came to mind. Rebecca was a book I’d long neglected, and despite it attaining exalted literary status, I knew little of the plot contortions beforehand, making everything a pleasant surprise. Both Rebecca and The Paying Guests share several similar traits. Both feature unique love triangles that subtly subvert old tropes. Both feature houses as major characters. Both start quite slow. And both end extremely fast.

Just like Rebecca, I hesitate to recommend The Paying Guests to others. It’s not because I don’t like them. To the contrary, I loved them both. But they require a certain kind of reader, with a certain kind of patience.

The Paying Guests is a novel about details. The slow, steady accretion of details. For a long time, this is an observational novel, tightly focused on Frances and told from a limited third-person point-of-view. A couple hundred pages go by in which the only set pieces are a trip to a skating rink and a boisterous family dinner. The plot meanders for quite a while. There is a wide arc of secondary characters and a creeping sense of aimlessness.

At a certain point, however, the plot clicks into place. Once it does, all the languidness, all the narrative uncertainty, all the deliberate flow of events disappears at once, and everything comes into focus. The book seamlessly transforms into a breathless kind of thriller that has you skimming the words on the page to find out what happens next (which, of course, is a shame, because Waters is a beautiful writer).

The Paying Guests was the first Waters novel I read, but it has not been my last. Plunging into her back catalogue has been quite fruitful. Her best known novel – and my favorite so far – has been Tipping the Velvet, an absolute romp that gives us a sprawling Dickensian bildungsroman in which Pip and David Copperfield are substituted for a young gay woman looking to find her place in the world. It’s even better than it sounds.

Though The Paying Guests does not reach the zany heights of Tipping the Velvet, it is still remarkable. Like Tipping the Velvet, The Paying Guests is a genre hybrid, using a hoary old framework and structure, but filling it with new and fascinating characters that enable Waters to take her tales in entirely unexpected directions.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Up until now, I have not read Sarah Waters. But if any of her previous books are half as compelling and page-turning as The Paying Guest, I have a big treat to look forward to in the near future.

To sum it up in three words: it’s a stunner. Any exploration of the plot will spoil the carefully-constructed narrative with its unexpected twists and turns. The bare bones are these: Frances Wright, considered a spinster at age 27 and believed a little “odd” because she is a lesbian, lives with her newly-impoverished mother in an upscale south part of London. Due to the ravages of the first world war, she and her mother are forced to accept lodgers (euphemistically called “paying guests”): a young couple, Leonard and Lilian Barber, of the clerk class. There are fractures in the couple’s marriage and soon, the situation will turn dire and fraught with consequences.

Why did I love it? First, the book is psychologically gripping. It alternately deals head-on with the thorniest of moral issues, including guilt, shame, and desperate hidden love. Secondly, the depiction of the postwar social landscape is meticulously painted. The class distinctions, the rise of the clerk class, the pretensions of the upper class, the undeserved elitism, are flawlessly rendered. Historically, too, this book is a winner, revealing the dashed hopes of ex-soldiers, the shifting expectations of the various classes, and the mores and manners of the 1920s.

Lastly, the careful look at England’s system of justice seems like it's an anachronism in our high-tech world, and that’s what makes it so very fascinating. It's like being permitted a glimpse into a time-capsule…into a society where everything was markedly different than it is today.

Exquisitely atmospheric, filled with psychological nuances, and laden with anticipation and suspense, The Paying Guests is a “can’t-put-down” read, told by a consummate storyteller. It is nearly 600 pages and yet I wished it had gone on for twice that long.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Turn off the phone, unplug the television, call in sick to work. Just do it now, before you open the front cover to The Paying Guests, so you won’t have to tear yourself away later on.

It’s 1922 and life in a dull London suburb has become one of drudgery and tedium for Frances Wray. Single, in her late 20s, and living with her widowed mother, Frances has narrowed her world to a pinpoint of housework and Wednesday trips to the cinema. Her older brothers were killed in the war and her father’s shady financial dealings left her and her mother in ruin, without even a cook or a lady’s maid. A further domestic insult opens the story: the Wrays are forced to take in lodgers, those “paying guests.”

Enter stage left: Lilian and Leonard Barber, she blowsy but sweet, he rakish and flirtatious in a way that leaves Frances slightly queasy. The reader, too. The small indignities of sharing a home—the trips through the Wray’s kitchen to access the outdoor toilet; the coughs and blowing noses and creaking of floor overhead, the chance meetings on the landing in one's dressing gown—Sarah Waters chronicles quotidian life in such excruciating detail that we feel as claustrophobic and impinged upon as Frances. But we know we must suffer, for how else will the butcher and gasman be paid at the end of the month?

And Voilà: the genius of Sarah Waters. Her scene setting is so exact, so rich and full, the reader is wholly transported to a place and time. She renders the feel of fabrics, the scent of cigarettes and sweat, the cool damp of a garden at night, the weight of a body dragged through the ripe mud, the electric touch of a lover's hand slipping over soft, eager skin. If you have read any other of Waters' lush fiction, you’ll know she sets the bar in the stratosphere when it comes to historical fiction and character depth. No crumpet is left untoasted. No heart left unscathed.

But this is so much more than a set piece. The Paying Guests is a crime thriller, to be sure, and something of a courtroom drama in its final chapters; but at its heart, it is the exploration of a woman’s soul. Frances Wray, tucked awkwardly between the end of the Edwardian era and the beginning of the Jazz Age, is stifled by time, culture, and sexual mores that deny her of her very essence. She has already paid a stiff price for a previous romance with a woman; to acknowledge that she has fallen in love again would be to open the door to her final ruin.

Yet, Frances is wonderfully, admirably comfortable with her sexuality. It is society that cannot accept her as she is. Ironically, it is this very society Frances allows to strap her down. She could, as her former lover has done, shuffle off to London—only a few tram stops away—and live a far freer life. Yet, she chooses her duty to her mother and manor and remains in a house that "produces dust, as flesh oozes sweat."

And oh, those choices. Worse follows bad and the reader sits with her hand pressed to her throat as she breathlessly turns the pages.

I remain deliberately oblique about the plot, for any further comments would produce only spoilers. Don’t be intimidated by this tome’s heft. Once started, you will not want to stop.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sarah Waters wrote Fingersmith and so attained semi-divine status in 2002. I really um and ah about reading anything else by one of my 5-star authors because the only way is down. The last two from SW (The Little Stranger & The Night Watch) never reached out tentacled appendages and bade me read them, but this one did.

And I’m in two minds about it, which is almost two whole minds more more than usual.

DIALOGUE BETWEEN PB’S TWO MINDS


- What have you been doing for the last 3 days? Reading this 564-big-pages whopper at great speed. Did you like it as you were hoovering up the plangent prose? Yes! For sure! I know, I was there.

- But, ermm, I thought that, er, maybe, just maybe, there were things that went on a bit too long and other things that didn’t go on long enough.

- Genius literary criticism worthy of David Foster Wallace! Can you expand on that a bit? That was a little too cryptic for me.

- Well, it’s really hard to talk about this novel in ANY kind of detail because it’s 100% about the plot, and the plot is a very simple thing, as a raindrop is simple, until its light refracts through a prism.

- Okay now you’re trying too hard. Give me an example of something which didn’t go on long enough – I mean this is a pretty long novel, yeah?

- The sex.

- Ha, well, now you’re just being sleazy, if you want to read Adult Romances there are other books, and I’m sure some of them are tales of lesbian lust set in the 1920s. No doubt websites too. Try www.sapphicflappers.com

- No but I thought these two lovely characters deserved a bit more of a good time before the Things that I Cannot Mention happened. It just wasn’t fair!

- Only real life is fair, fiction never is.

- And also some of the Things That I Cannot Mention kind of got repeated more than somewhat. And it was all a bit angst. Rather a lot of teeth grinding and snuffling into pocket handkerchiefs. It was a costume drama. White faces behind veils. The accused with bad teeth.

- And yet, little gracehoper, you didn’t stop reading it until the very last page, and I think if there was another 200 pages you’d have read those too, with relish.

- Oh yes, I thought she wrapped it up far too abruptly. It was a bit too much “in one bound Jack was free” or in their case Jacqueline.

- So I’m confused. What do we think?

- Well, this is why we’re in two minds.

- Ah yes.

- Hmmm.

- Hmmm.

- Four stars then?

- Well, it can’t be five, because of the meagre amount of sex, and because it surely isn’t as good as the shattering Fingersmith. So, yes, four stars it is.

The two minds converge. Ka-plunk!

[Blair]

It's with a heavy heart I have decided I am not going to finish reading this properly. I did, in fact, read more than halfway through before skimming the whole of the rest, right to the end, so really I could claim it as 'read' and give it a rating, but I'm not going to. I was looking forward to reading it so much, and am so disappointed I didn't like it.

Waters' last book, The Little Stranger, is one of my favourite books of all time, although the general consensus is that it is quite different from the rest of her work, and many readers think it is her worst. I enjoyed Fingersmith, which was truly 'unputdownable' and very emotive, if also quite depressing. Affinity I found rather dreary (though not without its merits). Of these, I feel The Paying Guests has the most in common with Affinity. It is certainly dreary, and while beautifully written it is incredibly dull, so dull I would have given up much, much sooner had it been the work of an author I was unfamiliar with. The entirety of the first half was boring - mainly building up to a development that every reader will surely anticipate from the first page, so there is no suspense - but I slogged on through, only to be confronted with another twist/'incident' that was also dull and somewhat predictable.

I also didn't warm to Frances, the protagonist, at all. I found her a cold, hard character with few sympathetic qualities. At times, I felt I really disliked her, although I couldn't quite put my finger on why - she just seemed like quite an unpleasant person, to me. I found her pursuit of Lilian pushy and manipulative, and I couldn't stop thinking about how horrified I would have been by some of her actions and thoughts had she been a male character. With, for example, Faraday in The Little Stranger, this sort of thing didn't spoil the story because he isn't supposed to be likeable; you're supposed to think he's a creep, that's part of the plot. But I felt I was meant to like Frances, to want her to 'get her way', and I just didn't. I preferred Lilian and felt rather sorry for her, but she never seemed to be fleshed out properly and was only seen through Frances' eyes; Frances' mother was very peripheral; and Leonard was an obvious sleazeball. All in all, not a group of people whose fates I could bring myself to care about.

By the time I reached the halfway mark I had a resolute gut feeling that I wasn't going to like the book no matter what; it would have taken something miraculous to change my mind. It even made me question whether I would really like The Little Stranger that much if I re-read it now - maybe my tastes have changed so much I wouldn't? I have, after all, struggled to enjoy any historical fiction in recent times, and have frequently been disappointed with historical novels others have loved, such as the much-fêted debut The Miniaturist (which itself was compared to Waters).

I'm sorry, Karen. The ARC will be finding its way to someone who will appreciate it more than I did, I promise!

[Baba · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's 1922 and numbers of Great War veterans roam the streets of South London; other shell shocked men live among their families and friends trying to carve out some sort of life, even though nightmares rule their subconscious. In this post war world, the widow Mrs Wray and her disconnected daughter Frances have come to the point where they have to take on paying guests, lodgers, if they want to keep their good-sized home in Camberwell. The falling from grace upper middle class lessees and aspiring working class lodgers find themselves sharing living spaces in the grand house, and for Frances what starts of as inquisitiveness, escalates to a lot more, giving us a story of vey forbidden lesbian love affair in the 1920s...

.. and murder!!!

I was probably too highly invested in the initial scene setting of 1920s South London (where I live) and the subtle reveal of one of the main protagonist's sexuality and then the ensuing affair, that when I came to the murder and the resulting events, I just wanted to go back to the tranquil and finely written pre-murder days. On a larger scale, I could suppose that the power of the book is that the same-sex relationship is not the entirety of their lives; but with the writer Sarah Waters, using murder as a counter balance, I found a tad disconcerting. Overall though, I presume this book was lauded for how it maps the relationship from first stirrings, through to capital crime and how the criminalisation and demonisation of same-sex relationships plays a significant role in how the lovers relate and react throughout their story, and just writing that made me give this read one more point than I intended! 7 out of 12.

[B the BookAddict · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt a personal link to this story: in 1922, my Nana, Florence, was the same age as the character, Frances Wray. Two brothers, George and Edwin served in WWI and during that war; they made a reciprocal promise to each other. Nana was engaged to George but sadly, he was killed just days before the war ended. Edwin came home to fulfil his part of the promise; he married Florence, who would become my Nana. The death of Florence’s father and two older brothers in the war meant the family money transferred to the next living male relative, a cousin. Florence and Edwin kept her four youngest siblings out of an orphanage by electing to bring the children into their home. They raised Florence’s siblings and four of their own children. Another example of how the WWI changed lives for those at home.

The review:
1922 and England is still recovering from the war, especially in the Wray household. Their reduced circumstances and the loss of the Wray sons and father, have made times tough for the Mrs Wray and Miss Frances Wray of Champion Street. The paying guests, Leonard and Lillian Barber are the new additions to the household. This couple will bring monumental change into the house in Champion Street, in ways neither of the Wrays could have predicted. The friendship between Lillian and Frances begins when they read the novel, Anna Karenina, and discuss their reactions to the novel and it’s characters. A love triangle evolves at Champion Street as the months progress but this is a love triangle, which is surprising to all, both the characters and the reader. As the months pass and the feelings of passion grow, they bring about a climax, which may change all of their fates. I don’t want to give too much of the plot away; it is best discovered by reading the novel.

Waters has created an intricate and compound story with esoteric characters. She weaves her plot, building the story seductively; it’s rhythm very much akin to pace of a burgeoning affair, anticipatory, sensory and taut. The story deals with moral issues, postwar England and the realisation of forbidden love; it is a story of both sensual discovery and a psychological drama . Incredibly atmospheric, The Paying Guests is a stunning offering by an already well-established author. 4.5★

[Cecily · Rating 4 out of 5]

SEX, fingers, blood, fingers, death, gloves, passion, feet, loss, fingers

I’m guessing that got your attention. It’s also the gist of the book, though not necessarily in that order. The first half is packed with sexual tension – and release - but most reviews seem to shy away from indicating that. Tastefully explicit, and touchingly erotic; “The PGs” is definitely not PG.

It’s a story of two very different parts (but oddly divided into three sections): the first is a love story, that is doubly taboo (two women; Frances is impoverished gentry, and Lilian is of the “clerk class”), and the second is a crime drama, culminating in lengthy court scenes. It’s set in London, in 1922. Frances Wray lives with her widowed mother; the father’s debts necessitate letting rooms to the aspirational insurance clerk, Len Barber, and his somewhat Bohemian wife, Lilian.

As I attempt to assemble my thoughts, they won’t really gel: most of the specific points that come to mind are criticisms or more like discussion points for a book group – and yet I eagerly raced through nearly 600 pages (and not just for the sex). That’s more of a mystery than the plot was. What follows may sound like a 3* review; the extra star I’ve awarded it reflects my enjoyment.

Overall, it seems a little unpolished, maybe even unfinished. Perhaps Waters has reached the degree of success that, like Rowling, means editors can be ignored, so perhaps they don’t bother to make many suggestions.

Sex and Sexuality… Praise and Prejudice

This is my second Waters. The other was Fingersmith, barely six months ago (review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

In Fingersmith, if you know nothing about the author, and especially if you do know the classic novel on which the plot is based, the brief lesbian scenes might have been a surprise. Here, though, it is obvious from the start who the central couple will be. That creates a different dynamic: the titillation of noting all the clues (long fingers, longing fingers, stolen glances, fleeting physical contact, removing gloves, a glimpse of a stocking), waiting for something definite to happen. When it does, it’s far headier than anything in Fingersmith, and fingers feature even more prominently throughout, not just in a direct, sensual way: Len has manicures (his mistress is a beautician), fingerprints are used in the investigation, and the significance of rings and removing or putting on gloves is never overlooked.

Waters based the book on high-profile murder cases of the period, but gave it a twist, by making Frances female. That gives Frances more of a backstory, and it makes later events more plausible, because most of the other characters never consider the possibility of two women being romantically involved.

One specific scene where her gender affects one’s interpretation is in the pantry. I was uneasy about how consensual that first encounter was: how coercive was Frances being? As the scene developed, those concerns subsided, and that was reinforced by subsequent events. Nevertheless, had Frances been a man, my unease would have been greater. Does that make me guilty of narrow-minded (hetero)sexism?

Another way Waters inverts traditional storytelling is that everyone starts off unhappily… and everyone ends up unhappily!

This is not a bad book – I enjoyed reading it and have given it 4* - but I don’t see why it has earned so much praise and so many literary awards. If Francis (male) rented out rooms, would the book have been lost in a sea of similar historical fiction? Quite possibly, but I suppose that’s the point: literature should break free of its relentlessly heterosexual norms, regardless of the sexuality of likely readers. I applaud that, really, I do. But it still doesn’t make this a great book, just an interesting and enjoyable one.

Tabloid Press

The evils of the tabloids are made painfully and plausibly clear: the way they exploit and harass those suffering, and the way gossip sells, even to those who disapprove, but find it irresistible. The press doorstep relatives, drip-feed salacious titbits, crop photos to twist the story, gate-crash a funeral, and so on. This is one of the stronger aspects of the book: it speaks to contemporary concerns without being heavy-handed, while being (I think) historically accurate. Also, it’s a theme that once it arises, is a consistent undercurrent.

Ambiguity is Good

I like the fact there are important, unanswered questions. I’m still pondering these half dozen:

1. Who was pulling whose strings? Was Frances the predatory one who ended up with more than she bargained for, or was Lilian using her all along? I think probably both: when Frances first told Lilian she was a lesbian, the friendship cooled. Maybe Lilian rekindled it only because she’d realised how she could use Frances to escape her marriage.

2. Lilian certainly wanted to get out of her marriage, though her motivation is cloudier: was it the lost child, Len’s affair, an entirely separate wish for independence? What was the nature of their relationship, especially the drunken game of Snakes and Ladders, where “Frances had the sense that their antics were a weird kind of show, done for here but not flattering to her”?

3. Lilian had explicitly wished Len dead at least once, and in the heat of the fight, I think she probably meant to kill him. Frances later asks if it was an accident, but Lilian evades the question and “straightens the cuffs of her gloves”. I’m less sure whether she had planned to kill him, or to find some other escape, such as exposing his affair. The life insurance suggests the former, though.

4. I doubt Lilian and Frances grow old together, but I'm less sure how long they might have tried to make a go of it or what sort of relationships either would go on to have. Lilian wouldn’t have stayed single for long, but male or female partner? I fear Frances would just retreat to resentful spinsterhood, either in the house of unhappy memories, with another set of paying guests, or, perhaps worse, in a smaller “clerk class” house with no memories.

5. How much did Frances’ mother guess? She knew her daughter had had one relationship with a woman (Christina) and had been concerned at the intensity of her friendship with Lilian (though that was partly a matter of their different social positions). There were oddities around the time of the murder, some of which she noticed; she even asks Frances outright if she is keeping secrets about the death. If she believed her daughter complicit in murder, how would that affect their already prickly relationship? As an upstanding member of the parish, would she try to persuade Frances to confess (probably), and if that failed, would she report Frances to the police (probably not)?

6. After Spencer’s acquittal, Frances and Lilian are understandably relieved. They discuss what’s happened, the power of love, the pain of an unhappy relationship, all the people who’ve been affected, but they don’t seem overly burdened about having got away with murder/manslaughter or about future police enquiries. Will they be able to shake it off and live almost as if nothing happened (and if so, what does that say about them?), or will fear and guilt gnaw away at them? Frances wonders if finding happiness would be an insult to those who’ve been harmed, or whether that means it’s their duty to strive for it. We don’t know what Lilian thinks.

Lost Plots

The two main parts of the story hold together well, and I like loose ends. However, there are sub plots and themes that arise, seem important, but are then overlooked, even when they are pertinent. That’s part of what I meant about it feeling unpolished:

1. Prejudice is inherent in the plot; it’s the root of everything, but it felt as if having made it a lesbian story, with an ex-suffragette… that was it. I’m not sure how I would have preferred it, but it seemed as if there was a message struggling to get out, that didn’t. The fact that Frances and Lilian are increasingly unsympathetic characters exacerbates that.

2. Politics is strong early on. We're told about Frances’ activism for women’s rights, to the fury and embarrassment of her parents. After multiple losses (two brothers, her father, and her lover), Frances loses that zeal for protest, which is understandable. However, it seems odd that political ideas cease to be mentioned, apart from frequent reminders that Frances once threw a shoe at an MP (I'm just surprised it wasn't a glove), along with regular crass observations about class differences.

3. Anna Karenina is a book loved by Frances and Lilian, which they discuss early on but then not mentioned for hundreds of pages, until a passing reference near the end. I thought it was going to be a running thread, with parallels to Waters’ story, and perhaps it is (especially the guilt and torment of the second part), but if so, it was a little too subtle for me, and perhaps for a mass-market novel. Either give little hints to the similarities throughout, or (as with Fingersmith) don’t mention the inspiration at all: leave it as a treat for those who know and notice.

Convenient Coincidences

One or two convenient coincidences would be fine, but there were too many significant ones. I don’t read much crime fiction, but surely part of the point is that it’s tightly plotted?

1. A failed marriage is never the fault of just one partner, but Frances and Lilian choose not to see any fault in Lilian at all. All the blame is laid on the pain of the lost child, and on Len. The fact he was always a bit of a letch and then had an affair makes his death less of a tragedy, and so mitigates any guilt.

2. No one saw Len come home up the front path on the evening of his death, even though it was still light.

3. The timing of unrelated events meant Lilian's abortion was assumed to be a miscarriage caused by the shock of Len’s death.

4. Spencer’s admitted previous assault on and threats to Len made the murder charge plausible. The fact Len hadn’t reported it to the police (though he told Lilian and the Wrays he had) made it even more so. The police and prosecution convinced themselves of it and then interpreted the evidence to fit.

5. Spencer's criminal record and “smirking nonchalance” in court made him an easy scapegoat in practical terms, and minimised the injustice of his being remanded and tried.

6. A last-minute witness got Spencer off the hook and off the noose, by confirming his alibi, and thus Frances and Lilian avoided the need to confess to spare his life.

Clunky Metaphors

I found it a racy read in more ways than one. Waters possibly overdid the fingers/gloves (plus a few bare feet) a little, and there were one or two phrases and metaphors that jarred. They are spoilered not because they give away plot, but because it looks a bit too snarky if they’re not hidden.

• "flurries of wind" – snow may be a cliché, but wind just sounds odd.

• “a striped pyjama suit” – even Americans didn’t/don’t say “pyjama/pajama suit” (I checked the Google Ngrams corpus!)

• "she felt as alive as a piece of radium" – huh?

• "chased away like a cockerel chasing away a ghost" – as if that’s a thing.

• "boneless with exhaustion" – if I’m exhausted, my bones feel heavy, but other friends have identified with this, so it may be unfair to include it here.

• Lilian’s lively décor “was as if a giant mouth had sucked a bag of boiled sweets and then given the house a lick” - yuk.

• The second sentence of the novel, relating to the imminent arrival of the paying guests and surely the book itself is the clichéd “It was like waiting to begin a journey”. But it is contradicted and reworked on the next page, “It was like ending one and not wanting to get out of the train”.

• "There was a quickening, a livening – Frances could think of nothing to compare it with save some culinary process. It was like the white of an egg growing pearly in hot water, a milk sauce thickening in the pan." Cos custard is so sexy.

• Awaiting the verdict, she was “slack as worn elastic yet had the taughtness of wire” – oxymorons can work, but I’m not sure that one does.

Quotes I Did Like

I thought the gradual build up of tension and passion was really well done, but those lines are all about context, rather than the words themselves. These lines stand on their own, though:

• Furniture moved to a lesser setting seemed “to be sitting as tensely as unhappy visitors… pining for their grooves and smooches in the room above”.

• On Lilian’s eclectic décor, “If only she would decide on a country and have done with it” is almost worthy of Oscar Wilde.

• “Her gaze… seemed always to be in the process of sliding away, and her pose was a cautious one, as if she were reaching into a thicket, trying to avoid being snagged by thorns.”

• After a makeover, “She felt half disguised by the outfit; half exposed by it”.

• “They could never have looked at each other so nakedly in the dangerous privacy of Champion Hill.”

• Lovers escaping a party “feeling unmoored, suspended, lapped about by the liquid blue night”.

• “They went in and out of lamplight, their shadows fluid under their feet.”

• “The muted tap of her wedding-band, a small chill sound in the darkness.”

• “Sunday, that dull, dull tyrant.”

• “The whole furtive business… of finding and securing and making the most of scraps of time with her – those juicy but elusive morsels of time, that had to be eased like winkles out of their shells, then gobbled down with an eye on the door, an ear to the stair, never comfortably savoured – it had all… been crushing the life out of her.”

• Of a police inspector, “Frances had the impression that his friendliness was all surface – or worse than that, was somehow strategic”.

• “Her own fingers felt blind… The ease and familiarity were gone.”

• “Gardening was simply open-air housework.”

[Jenne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part 1: cosy and a bit drab but in an interesting way, like a Barbara Pym novel (hmm, I thought, this is a new side of Sarah Waters)
Part 2: SEXY (oh never mind, there she is!)
Part 3: brutal, agonizing tension like waiting for medical results or SAT scores
Part 4: (yeah right, like I'm going to spoil the ending for you)

[Dianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is so much to like about this book. Sarah Waters slowly and exquisitely sets her scene, 1922 London after World War I. Frances Wray and her mother live in an aging home in a genteel London neighborhood. Their fortunes have suffered due to unfortunate investments and they are forced to take in boarders, called “paying guests.” The boarders are a young married couple, Lilian and Leonard Barber. This simple act of economy has unintended consequences that transforms lives forever.

I don’t want to give too much away by revealing the details of the plot – I will say that what started out as a lovely piece of historical fiction turned into something else entirely. It became a bit of an erotic gothic potboiler, although with a modern twist, and then a mystery and suspense novel. Until the very end, I was not sure how it would end.

Some thoughts – the book is beautifully written. If you enjoy language and prose and leisurely and nuanced writing, you will certainly like Sarah Waters. She does a superb job of creating atmosphere and the milieu of post-World War I London. I do feel it was overlong (it seems like I am always saying this lately, so perhaps this is just a bias of mine). It lagged in the middle third of the book – it got repetitive, I felt like Frances and Lilian kept having the same conversations over and over. The last third was suspenseful but felt artificial. Waters kept slipping in red herrings to misdirect the reader, but it felt forced. None of it seemed very likely to me, especially the neatly wrapped-up ending.

This is a 3.5 for me. Full of promise at the start but ultimately misses the mark at the end.

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am conflicted about this novel. The prose is lovely and I really liked the first half of the book, but I grew impatient with the stale plotting of the second half.

The heroine of the story is Frances Wray, who lives with her widowed mother in a genteel home in 1920s London. To help pay the bills, the Wrays take in lodgers, who are politely called "paying guests." The lodgers are a young married couple, Lilian and Leonard Barber. Frances becomes friends with Lilian, and then falls in love with her.

Frances shares her sad tale with Lilian, which is that previously she had a love affair with a woman named Christina, but Frances ended it when her mother found out and became upset. Lilian and Frances begin a secret love affair, and Frances hopes that Lilian will leave her husband and then they can live together. But their plans are interrupted when Leonard surprises them one night. To discuss some of my complaints about the rest of the novel, I need to write a long spoiler.


As a character, Frances was irritating. Midway through the book, Lilian became pregnant with Leonard's baby and decides she wants to get rid of it. Frances, despite earlier stories of her progressiveness and feminist ideals, objects to Lilian's plan and tries to talk her out of it. Huh? The author doesn't explain why Frances wanted her to keep the baby, especially since Lilian said she wanted to leave her husband. At no point does France say she wants to raise the baby with Lilian — she just suddenly became conservative and objected to the planned abortion.

But my real irritation was with the second half of the book. Leonard comes home early one night and catches the women in a suspicious act. Leonard starts bullying Lilian, and she announces that she wants a divorce because she is in love with Frances. Leonard becomes violent, and in an act of defense, Lilian hits him in the head with a metal ashtray, killing him. Frances wants to call the police, but Lilian wants to move the body outside to make it look like he fell in the road.

The rest of the book follows a long and tedious police investigation, and then a long and tedious trial when someone else is accused of the murder. Frances dithers constantly, fretting over whether or not they should confess and constantly running to Lilian and whispering about the case. The plot device of an accidental death and trying to hide information from police is so overused that I actually groaned when I reached that point in the book. There was also the trope that Frances became suspicious of Lilian, fretting that she would go to the police and try to pin the murder on her, or that she would break down and admit to the accidental killing during one of those times when Frances didn't want to be discovered. (Frances was constantly dithering between feeling guilty and wanting freedom.) Additionally, the ending of the book was anti-climatic, and I don't think we needed to plod through such an extended courtroom drama to get there.


In summary, the character of Frances became so annoying that I stopped rooting for her. However, I have to admit that Sarah Waters' prose is lovely. Her descriptions could be beautiful and thoughtful, and I think this is a case in which the novel needed more editing and streamlining. At more than 550 pages, some chunks could have been cut.

I wrestled with what rating to give this book, and I think three stars is fair. I did like parts of it, but I would recommend it with caution.

Audiobook Note
I listened to this on audio, read by Juliet Stevenson, and she was fantastic. If I could rate just Juliet's performance, it would be five stars. I loved her reading so much I am going to look up other audiobooks she has recorded, which is apparently an extensive collection.

Favorite Quotes
"Frances didn't like surprises. She hated the thought of people plotting and planning on her behalf. She loathed the burden of being delighted once the surprise was disclosed."

"What was the use of her being alive? Her heart was some desiccated thing: a prune, a fossil, a piece of clinker. Her mouth might as well be filled with ashes. It was all utterly hopeless and futile..."

"They had no idea how decency, loyalty, courage, how it all shriveled away when one was frightened."

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where I got the book: purchased on Kindle. A read for my IRL book club.

I came to this novel having barely skimmed the description, so I had absolutely no idea what to expect. As I started it, one book club friend was lamenting that she was waiting for something to happen…

And I must admit, this story has a slow lead-in. It’s 1922; London is still recovering from the War, with unemployed ex-servicemen everywhere, many families still mourning the men they’ve lost, and the former servant class deserting their pre-War positions for greener pastures. Frances and her mother are forced, by their dwindling income, to let out part of their house to lodgers, or “paying guests” as it’s known in their genteel part of London. (I believe Champion Hill is an invented location, but Waters makes it completely convincing.) Their guests turn out to be Len and Lil Barber, several steps below the Wrays on the social scale but definitely climbing—Len has a good job, and Lil leads the idle, pointless life of a lower-middle-class wife. The upper middle classes and those above them are expected to do charity work, and Mrs. Wray still clings to this routine, leaving Frances to do all the housework since they can no longer afford servants.

The story gradually builds through the inevitable encounters between the Wrays and the Barbers, mostly due to the fact that you have to pass through the kitchen to get to the toilet. One of the frequently encountered peculiarities of English houses, even less than a century ago, was that even a plumbed-in toilet was outdoors—my parents’ house, which was built in the Thirties, still has theirs, attached to the kitchen wall but very definitely outside (the one in the bathroom was put there later). At my great-grandmother’s house, you had to “go down the garden” to “see Auntie.” I know, it makes me feel like a relic from another age. (My other grandparents’ house had an inside loo of the enormous Victorian variety, with a stout wooden seat, hard semi-transparent paper, and tooth powder instead of toothpaste in the bathroom. I am OLD.)

Another location for encounters is the upstairs landing, since Frances still has her bedroom on that floor; the Barbers spill out of their space into the Wrays’, a perpetual intrusion that announces just how much space they are going to take up in the lives of the two Wray women.

Despite Mrs. Wray’s reluctance to have anything more to do with “that class of people” than they have to, a friendship slowly builds between Lil and Frances. Along the way we also find out that the great love of Frances’ life was a woman, Chrissy, whom she still visits, but that when it came to choosing between her mother and respectability or Chrissy, social ostracism, and a bohemian lifestyle, Frances took the easier path. Chrissy has moved on, while Frances is still stuck, clinging to the shreds of an old life which is literally falling into pieces around her (her clothing, her hidden underwear in particular, is wearing thin and falling into holes—a nice touch.)

And up to this point, despite the fact that there wasn’t much happening, I was absorbed in the story. I loved the depiction of post-War London with its gradually changing social attitudes and the rise of the new type of middle class represented by Lil and Len. I loved the tension the Wray women experience when it comes to keeping up appearances. I enjoy literary novels which present the reader with slow revelation of the truths and lies of the past. I had only a vague idea of where the story was going, but I was comfortable with it.

And THEN…Well, I’m not going to tell you. Seriously, this novel is best read without spoilers of any kind—let me just say that my friend’s complaint about nothing happening simply meant she hadn’t read far enough into the book. There were several twists, too, so just when I thought I was pretty sure of the outcome, the rug was pulled out from under my feet and I had to start guessing all over again. Which is why I stayed up way too late last night so I could finish it.

The writing is beautiful, without a single word out of place or any slip into too-modern speech or attitudes. It’s a novel in the tradition of literary realism, a very warts-and-all look at humankind that nonetheless never slides into outright pessimism or dislike of the human race. I’m trying to decide whether Waters wrote from a stance of moral impartiality (as far as that can be achieved) or whether her sympathies did, after all, lean toward her protagonists. She does make it clear that we have a choice as to the paths we are going to take, even when we feel caught up in events, but shows, I think, that we make those choices wearing a blindfold.

Some of the realism overwhelmed me at times, especially at one point when I felt there were far too many bodily fluids sloshing around. I have my limits. And there was something eerily symbolic about that whole business of constantly passing through the kitchen to get to the bathroom…and the house that Frances never seemed able to keep clean after a while, and that began literally disintegrating by the end. Of course it was a whole world that disintegrated as a result of the First World War, only I don’t suppose the people caught up in that war actually realized it until much later.

All ramblings aside, this was a nice literary read, and a painstakingly researched piece of historical fiction to boot. I feel like there are some very strong writers in the British Isles right now, many of them of an age that promises a good many books to come. Going to Sarah Waters’ author page, I note I have three more of her books on my TBR list—I just requested The Little Stranger from the library, to round out my acquaintance with her writing.

I think The Paying Guests will probably earn a place in my Top Ten for 2014. Recommended.

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Formerly well-off Frances Wray and her mother are having a hard time in post-WWI London. Frances' brothers were lost in the war and her father died leaving a load of debt. To conserve money the Wrays had to let the help go. So 26-year-old Frances has to do all the household chores.....



.....while her mother - apparently unable or unwilling to do any cooking or cleaning - goes about her personal business.



Thus Frances is generally roughly dressed, tired, and sporting the rough, red hands of a charwoman. Not the life she had pictured for herself.

To help pay the bills the Wrays decide to rent part of their house to paying guests, Leonard and Lillian Barber. The Barbers are an upwardly mobile twenty-something couple that have little in common with the Wrays.



Leonard works for an insurance company while Lillian stays home lounging and decorating her rooms to resemble an exotic bazaar.

Though Frances is put off by brash, intrusive Leonard she starts to becomes friendly with the Barbers. On a night when there's been too much drinking this leads to an uncomfortable game of 'Snakes and Ladders' where a drunk Leonard enforces his own made-up rules. Frances is embarrassed and starts to sense some trouble in the Barber marriage.



Living in the same house, Frances and Lillian become friendly, with chats and walks and picnics. Eventually Lillian cuts and waves Frances' hair, updates her party gown, and takes her to a relative's birthday party.....



.....where there's drinking, dancing, and flirting.



Leonard also seems to like Frances, and hangs around to talk to her whenever he gets the chance. Proximity and attraction lead to a relationship that ultimately results in a terrible accident, a police investigation, and a trial.



The author is adept at depicting emotions and the characters feelings of love, desire, worry, anger, despair, and so on seem authentic and true to life. That said, I didn't especially like many of the characters. Frances seems pushy and a little selfish, Lillian appears a bit manipulative and obtuse, and Leonard comes across as a bully and a lech. I felt some sympathy for Mrs. Wray, who lost her sons and husband and is bewildered by her daughter.



And I was entertained by Lillian's large, boisterous family, who inject a needed touch of humor into the book.

To me the story was disturbing but this is a good book that's well-written and worth reading. Plus it contains subject matter that's good fodder for book clubs.

You can follow my reviews at http://reviewsbybarbsaffer.blogspot.com/

[Dorie - Cats&Books :) · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just listened to this audiobook and it was great! Here it is 1922 in a genteel house in a genteel neighborhood jut outside London and Mrs. Wray and her 26 y/o daughter Frances pass each day very much like the day before.

This all changes when they decide to take in Paying Guests, to rent out some of their rooms so that they can make ends meet and continue to stay in the house, money is very tight.

Eventually there is a love affair, a murder and this evolves into an edge of your seat crime thriller. So very interesting and the audiobook was extremely well narrated.

Very unique and original story. Wonderfully described, fully developed characters, I loved it.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now this was a BOOK.

I don't want to say much about this one. And I really don't think it's a good idea to go nosing about for information. Just wait patiently until it hits the shelves (or do what I did: stew about it and figure out a way to get a copy early and fast). Go into into this one as green as you can. Don't read any reviews (okay, maybe karen's: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ). I've checked out the reviews, and there are a few gals who seem to be spoiler-buttoned-challenged and I would just hate for you to read something you shouldn't. Here are some general feelings on this book:

Such a way with words! The characters were fantastic. Like real people. I loved Frances. She was perfect. This is how you set a scene. Was I there? I could swear I was there. It was almost like two books in one. There was a clear division (for me) between 'books'. I loved it all, but the 'first book' was just heaven (Delee, you'll feel the same way about the 'second book').

I'm so excited for all my gals who have this one to look forward to! It was allllll we knew it would be! I can't wait for your reviews. I'll be ready and willing to chat about this one, it won't soon leave me :)

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good as a time machine to London in the period of recovery after World War 1. A domestic drama plays out in the life of Frances and her mother that begins with taking on a young couple, the Barbers, as boarders. The economic pinch of the losses of a father and brothers in the war has them relinquishing an upper class life with servants and struggling to keep their house. The sense of invasion of their life to these “paying guests” is well done. The Barbers are of the “clerking class” who dream of upward mobility, so the story of the evolution of their relationships with their new landlords represents a bit of a microcosm of the changing of British social structure in the 20s. However, any ferment of modernism has little impact on Frances’ ability to be open about her lesbianism.

It’s hard to say anything more without spoiling the plot. I can say that much of the book excels in the atmospherics and hothouse claustrophobic feel of domestic life where secrets are guarded and only doled out in special circumstances of trust. There are open vistas with Frances’ love life and tragic complications that approach soap opera proportions. But unlike typical pot-boilers, no one emerges as a master of their fate and lessons learned remain obscure. I empathized with Frances, though she comes off as neither hero or villain, merely a relatively ordinary woman struggling to achieve self-fulfillment and challenged by tough moral decisions.

For me this read was a step up from the only other book of hers I have read, the Gothic tale “The Night Watch”, though it was not as satisfying as other books I’ve rendered 4 stars for (i.e. a rounding up from 3.5). I look forward to trying her more well received books such as “Fingersmith” and “Tipping the Velvet.”

[Trish · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first Sarah Waters and I was surprised to find it darker and creepier than her mainstream popularity led me to expect. I must have been adding my own embellishments as I read others’ reviews, creating my own reality. In a way, this is what Waters’ central character, Frances, does in this story about mores in 1920’s England and two women who try to find their way to love in secret.

Frances belongs to a genteel household which includes only herself and her mother now at the end of WWI which had taken off her brothers, and finished her father. To pay the bills, she invites two newly married boarders, "Len and Lil," to take up residence in the upstairs rooms. As Frances begins to hate pushy, overbearing, and snide Len, she simultaneously finds herself attracted to Lil. When Frances and Lil come together physically, I found myself disturbed—not so much by the idea of sex between two young women—as by the niggling sense of emotional coercion by Frances. As the story proceeded, that unease did not abate. And even Lil finally says it in the final chapters: "You always bully me, Frances."

The story is a long one, and we are drawn into the world of criminal courts and family relationships that complicate the budding romance between the two central characters. The sense of disaster hangs over one quite palpably as the relationship between the two starts to fray under the strain of their involvement in the criminal case before the courts. One might say that neither woman showed herself to advantage in the maelstrom of accusations and public interest, and therein lie the darkness: no matter that we readers knew of their role and could exonerate them, there was still something devious, in their hearts and in their actions, that made us dislike and distrust them nonetheless.

This is a marvelous bit of writing that could make us so uneasy and feel the looming darkness in every scene. Much has been made of the sensuality with which the two women took to their bed, but it is that which made me uneasy. Lil was married but had never been properly “loved” and was therefore susceptible to someone who could bring her to orgasm. But sex, wondrous though it is, is not love after all. This is what I mean about “emotional coercion.” I think Frances knew this, and despite that knowledge, acted in her own self-interest and without the love she needed to make us more comfortable with her actions.

Sarah Waters’ writing is beautifully crafted but Louise Welsh dark (The Cutting Room, The Bullet Trick) and Patricia Highsmith dark (The Talented Mr. Ripley, Strangers on a Train). Such a long book requires days of attention, and that darkness stays with one long after. Her roster of critical successes speaks to her talent.

I listened to the audio of this title, generously provided by Penguin Random House Audio, and narrated with great skill and terrific accents by Juliet Stevenson.

[Terri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a slow read and packed with lots of details of English domestic life so be warned. I plodded through semi-interested and occasionally riveted. The ending is a humdinger (don't you love that word) and so I am glad I stuck with it. I am a fan of the talented Welsh author Sarah Waters. If you haven't read "Fingersmith" or "The Little Stranger"...go pick up some copies.
Her book is set in 1922 in Camberwell, South London, where a elderly widow and adult daughter live in a comfortable home. Times are tough and the servants are gone, so the daughter is part maid and cook for her mother. World War 1 has wipes out the young men in the area, including male family members, so everyone is in a state of mourning. They decide to take in lodgers to help bring in some much needed money and that is when the troubles start. A moral crisis begins and then the book comes to life.

[Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! What an incredible book. Sarah Waters has created a marvelous piece of historical fiction set in England 1922 in a genteel Camberwell neighborhood. The war has ended. Many have died, including the protagonist’s two brothers and her father. Those that returned from the war are disillusioned. Frances Wray and her mother are left bankrupt by their father who squandered away their money. They have dismissed the servants and are now taking in boarders. Frances does all the cleaning and cooking herself, while her mother is out, so that she will not have to watch her daughter stooping to that occupation.

The guests who become “the paying guests” are a young couple of the clerk class, Mr. and Mrs. Barber (Leonard and Lilian.) Mr. Barber is talkative and makes Frances uncomfortable with his innuendos. Mrs. Barber hides herself away at first, but soon she and Frances develop a close friendship. As they grow closer, Frances divulges to Lilian that she had been in love with a woman, Christina, but was made to put an end to the relationship by her parents. In a time when London has been devastated by war, the family brought down by multiple deaths and financial ruin, certain societal norms are not to be challenged.

The knowledge that Frances is a lesbian or had a lesbian lover seemingly creates a tension or barrier to their friendship. Lilian avoids Frances until the night of Lilian’s family party which she had invited Frances to many weeks prior in Mr. Barber’s stead as he had a supper to attend that evening.

At the party, Mrs. Barber dances freely with several gentleman and even with Frances. After returning home, they find Leonard has been assaulted and is in the kitchen with a bloodied nose and face. Later that evening, Frances and Lilian return to the kitchen and embark on their steamy sultry love affair making love in the pantry. The love affair continues and their feelings continue to grow until Leonard is accidentally murdered which is ruled a homicide. This leads to a coverup, incredible tension, outing of other affairs, and the need for deep secrecy of their own love affair.

This book is amazing on so many levels. The historical piece seems so spot on and well done. There was never a point where anything seemed even questionably out of the time period. I felt as if I were dwelling in London in the 1920s alongside these characters. The character building and tension that was created were so well done. I must admit I was getting antsy during the investigation and the trial that seemed to go on for so long, but that was the point. It keeps you on the edge of your seat. It keeps me questioning Lillian’s motives while still hoping the romance will last. This novel would make an excellent independent film with sexy enthralling characters. It would be amazing! It is an incredibly written book that I highly recommend to everyone. The one caveat is that it can seem to be going really slow at some points, which I didn't mind, but might not appeal to some.

[Jan-Maat]

A crime pays story, the moral of which is to always take out life insurance; so if your spouse murders you, then at least one of you will get to live happily or in financial comfort at least (for a couple of years).

Coming to this book I felt I had been spoilt by a nasty, frightful experience while reading the Essex serpent - at one points a couple of characters are do-gooding in some poor area of London in 1893, in a doorway a girl is looking at the cover of Vogue magazine, some weeks after reading I happened to see an article about the 100th anniversary of (UK) Vogue magazine - in 2021 which mentioned that while Vogue had started earlier in the USA it was at first only an expensive New York magazine, making a minor background detail more from unlikely to highly implausible or indeed requiring a more complex backstory than any of the novel's characters.

So while I was completely delighted with the Camberwell setting of this tale of love and murder, the part of London where I was born and grew not very tall I was doubtful if you can or in 1922, could see the hospital from Ruskin Park - though of course I was even shorter then.

Again as with the little stranger I found the pace of this novel unsatisfying rather as if there had been an old film of the stranger drifts into town and love triangle, murder ensues, followed by trial that was less than two hours long that was now being remade into a twelve part mini series each episode an hour and a half long. In places the depth and space was rich but I notice by about page 150 as the novel began to lift up its skirts and hurry, I began to skim reading, pausing to read carefully only at some moment of interest - such as to see what route the characters took from their house to Herne Hill skating rink sadly this wasn't detailed, but I assume down Denmark Hill and then into Half Moon Lane, maybe crossing the road at the point where later I would fervently (and wrongly) believe that Georgi Markov had been assassinated by a poisoned umbrella tip .

In this novel we inhabit the point of view of Frances Wray (spinster), a bitter and frustrated young woman, struggling to maintain her mother in some degree of normal comfort for a 1922 middle class
family. The First World War has left them financially embarrassed and as the story begins they are waiting for the arrival of two tenants to rescue their finances. This element of the story is probably in relation to George Gissings The Paying Guest I say "probably" because I have not read it, but from the reviews I have seen on GR there are some thematic overlaps

An early (page 42) mention of Angelo Bronzino's Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time serves pretty much as a précis of the plot, with the twist that the relationship is a same sex one. This has several nice consequences, one I particularly liked was the sense from Frances Wray of the pyramid scheme of heterosexuality ie people who are in it are compelled to recruit others to join it too, meaning that the poor woman who is not so inclined regularly causes confusion and frustration among those around her.

Later in reading I thought that this was a British, or English, or maybe just a London Crime and Punishment - in that just one little murder stands between an idealistic yet frustrated young person and a life of benevolence and happiness, there's a similar cat and mouse game with law enforcement I am at risk of writing a long digression, but I think I can contain the urge for once it involved Douglas Adams and the point of view character's unhealthy state of mind. Eventually though I noticed that this novel was 595 pages long, and I thought: that is the equivalent of three Penelope Fitzgerald novels, or four and a bit Georges Simenon books - and in his Romans durs he tells pretty much the same kind of stories as Waters does here.

Sarah Waters can do many things well, particular men who seem ok at first but then turn out to be unpleasant, but apparently concision is not something she is interested in, instead she offers her readers an immersive experience, unfortunately her point of view characters here and in the little stranger are not easy people to cohabit with.


" she felt similarly about housework liking best those rather out of the way tasks- stripping the stove cleaning the stale rods - that needed planning, strategy, chemicals special tools" (p.24) - when I read that I was already imagining how this story would go, well I fooled myself there a spoiler would be to tell you that that sentence is irony

[Mona · Rating 3 out of 5]

Admirable Historical Writing, but Too Unremittingly Bleak to be Enjoyable

This is a tough book to review.

I admired the author's skill.

The characters are believable, especially the very sympathetic Frances Wray, the main character.

The author’s accuracy of time and place is excellent. So is the muted tone of the prose.

And Juliet Stevenson did a nearly superhuman job reading the audio. This cannot have been the easiest material to read.

But....

The book is so bleak (although the ending is more hopeful than much of what proceeds it), that it wasn't exactly a fun read. I can't call it completely tragic, because of the ending. Still, many tragic things occur. There's little humor to relieve the darkness, although there are occasional funny moments here and there.

The pace is slow (almost sleepy, in keeping with the time and place), especially in the first half of the book. Midway through the book, an event occurs which alters everything. After that, it's still slow going, but there's a lot more tension.

Frances Wray, a 26 year old woman, and her aging mother are impoverished British aristocrats living in the upscale Champion Hill section of Camberwell in 1922 London. They live in a large old (and once fine) house. They are forced to take in lodgers ("paying guests" in the polite lingo of the time) to make ends meet. They are in this situation because Frances' father was apparently a careless man who made some bad investments, so when he died they were left with little except the house.

The families' two sons were killed in World War I. So this is a time when women were running things in Britain because so many of the men died in the war.

The capable Frances does nearly all of the household chores, as the Wrays can no longer afford servants.

The Wrays choose a married couple, Lilian and Leonard Barber, as lodgers.

I won't say more about the story (to avoid spoilers) except that the Barbers bring the Wrays more than just a rent check.

Frances, the main character, is entirely believable and sympathetic. We feel for her ups and downs (and there are many).

I found this novel vaguely reminiscent (at times) of other British authors. There was a whiff of Virginia Woolf (in the glimpses of inner sadness and loneliness), of Harold Pinter (in the vague and unstated menace) and of American writer Connie Willis who writes about Britain (in the lack of communication between clueless characters). Possibly these are themes that British authors favor.

I can live with a book that has a slow pace, although I found this book a bit too long. But the grimness of Frances' world started to really get me down. I suppose in a way that's a testament to the author's ability to create a character with whom readers can empathize. Also, everyone is so trapped in the conventions and prejudices of Britain in 1922. Certainly those conventions make Frances' life very difficult.

BTW, the women are (mostly) sympathetic characters, although Lilian Barber is a mixed bag. They tell many lies, but somehow we don't hold it against them. But the male characters are nearly uniformly predatory, unsympathetic louts. Is this because as the refrain in the book goes "the best of them died in the War?" Or does it reflect the author's bias? Hard to say for certain.

I prefer a read that, while it may be tragic, has some leavening of wit or lightness here and there.

So that's why I gave this only three stars, although Sarah Waters is clearly an excellent writer of historical fiction.

[BrokenTune · Rating 5 out of 5]

"They had no idea how decency, loyalty, courage, how it all shriveled away when one was frightened."

So, days after finishing The Paying Guests I am still shaking my head in disbelief. Disbelief that a book can have the power to torment me and make me feel like it tied me to the rear bumper and dragged me backwards through vast wilderness of human emotions.

The story is set in London of the 1920s complete with luscious descriptions of fashion and day-to-day details of the post-war life. Left in difficult financial circumstances, Frances Wray and her mother have decided to take in lodgers to support their income.

What follows in the first half of this book is the slow but steady build up of tension which left me hanging on to every page with anticipation of when that tension would be released. If it would be released.
There is the tension between the characters. There is the issue of social tension, the contrast between the conventional and the modern, the question of roles. There is regret and the promise of making up for past mistakes. There is deceit and there is the test of courage. And...

"Didn't they almost have a duty to make one small brave thing happen at last?"

What The Paying Guests offers is a masterful web spun by Waters' meticulous detail and beautiful use of language. It's a psychological thriller in the tradition of Patricia Highsmith or Alfred Hitchcock, except that Waters' characters are more lifelike, likable, and that the full picture is not revealed until, ... well, not until, you have been taken on this rollercoaster ride, and have progressed through the trials that the characters face, and not until you have worried with them, lived with them, and loved with them.

"But for now there was this, and it was enough. It was more than [I] could have hoped for."

Needless to say, Sarah Waters has just claimed her spot on my "favourites" shelf.
This was a difficult review, not just because there are so many aspects to this novel that I am unable to summarise but also because when reading The Paying Guests it pays off to know nothing about it. However, there is one passage which I would like to quote but really do not want to spoil the reading experience for anyone.

So only read on if you either have read the book or have no intention of reading it:

"They faced each other in the silence broken by the trickle of a faulty cistern, by the flutter of pigeons in the light-well. The room smelt of bleach and of sour wet mops. But Lilian looked back at her with eyes grown silvery with tears, and for a moment, the room, the trial, Leonard, the summer, their whole affair, it was as if none of it had yet happened. As if their love were to be done again, but done properly. As if they were back in Frances' bedroom the day after snakes and ladders, that imaginary stake just drawn from her heart. But across the moment there came from out in the hall the clanging of a bell, almost instantly followed by footsteps."

Review first posted on BookLikes: http://brokentune.booklikes.com/post/...

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This atmospheric novel is set in London, 1922. The country is still reeling after the First World War and, in Camberwell, widowed Mrs Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are just two women dealing with the aftermath. The house resounds with ghosts, including that of Mrs Wray’s sons, John Arthur and Noel, who died in the war. Frances, meanwhile, is full of resentment; much of it aimed at her dead father, who she felt bullied her brother’s into enlisting, before leaving her and her mother behind in debt. Now, with no servants to help, Frances has given up plans for herself to spend her days doing the housework that her mother resents her having to do, yet chides her if it is not done properly. Resentment, an air of ‘making do’ and genteel poverty cloak their lives and, eventually, drastic means are called for. Frances decides that the only way of affording to live in their home is to take in lodgers – or, as they are called rather prosaically, ‘Paying Guests.’

Into the lives of Frances and Mrs Wray come Leonard and Lilian Barber. They invade the space of the house and also enliven it. There is Len, with his jokey innuendos and cheerful air of activity; Lil with her bohemian inspired decorations, her mother and sisters, her conversation and feminine dresses. Although, at first, Frances finds it difficult to share the space of her home with others, eventually she is almost forced into contact with them. The couple have to go through the kitchen to the outside toilet and the upstairs landing houses Frances’ bedroom, as well as the Barber’s rooms.

It is difficult to review this novel, without giving away the plot and I have no wish to do that. Frances is a complicated young woman, who feels she has been forced to give up her own wishes for that of her father and now her mother and the house. Her gradually building relationship with Lilian opens doors that she had firmly closed and results in a shocking event which forms the last third of the book.

Slow moving and emotional, the heart of this novel is, however, not really in the plot, but in the character of Frances herself. She is a product of her time – she believed in the suffragette movement and had dreams of a life and a career outside of the home. With the men of her generation killed in the war, she finds herself trapped in the home, embittered and lonely. Where so many authors throw plot and characters at you, Sarah Waters allows the storyline and characters to develop gradually. As you begin to know Frances and understand her, the plot unfolds before you – unstoppable and yet, so gradual that you almost feel it could be changed at any moment. Superb writing and literary fiction of the highest order make this a novel I will surely return to.

[Felicity Allan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Groosly overwriten and cliched, the most glaring deficiency is a complete lack of firm, sympathetic editing. Key scenes, when they eventually arrive, are marred by repetition, bad use of adjectives and seriously poor punctuation.

The main protagonists are completely two dimensional, particularly the ghastly, flaccid Lilian, and there is a passage in serious contention for the Bad Sex prize.

The narrative is very obviously a close copy of 'A Pin To See The Peepshow', which is sad given Sarah Waters' former originality. It has all the hallmarks of a book laboured over under contract. Ms Waters should be allowed ten years if she needs it.

A bad and exhausting read.

FMA

[Becky · Rating 2 out of 5]

Let me preface this review by saying that I love Sarah Waters as an author. Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet are two of my favourite novels. I was therefore quietly certain The Paying Guests would be incredible, and had no qualms about splurging on the hardback version. But my GOD, what a waste of time and money!

CHARACTERS:
Waters makes a point of repeating that Frances Wray, the protagonist, used to be a sassy little firecracker, because she did done some sex with a girl called Christine, and also she threw a shoe at a politician this one time. Sadly, all this does is serve to emphasise the fact that Frances is now awfully, dreadfully, sinfully BORING.

You'd think that some saucy adulterous frolicking with her lodger, Mrs Lilian Barber, would spice things up a bit, right? Especially since said lodger is all EXOTIC, on account of her playing a gypsy tambourine while wearing Turkish slippers and a kimono that gapes at the thigh. Which would be true, if not for the fact that Lilian also suffers from a raging case of tedious dullness.

Frances' dead war-hero brothers seem only ever to be mentioned in passing, so as to provide the Token Tragic Backstory, and Mrs Wray - Frances' mother - is alternately frail and sniffy about Frances/the lodgers/her daughter's latent homogayness. I am certainly not averse to a cast made up almost entirely of women, but at least ONE of them should have some semblance of a personality.


PLOT:
Good lord, does this ever progress at snail's pace. The house is old and big. Frances cleans a lot. They have no money. She goes to the cinema on Wednesdays with her mum. Frances is bored, and boring. You can hear the lodgers moving about upstairs. Sometimes that's sexy? Maybe? Mrs Wray is old and has old skin. She gets tired and occasionally goes to bed early. FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST WHEN IS SOMETHING GOING TO HAPPEN?

Something does happen...eventually. It should theoretically be dramatic enough to inject some life into the book's shrivelled veins - but alas, it does not. Waters virtually dragged these reluctant characters through a half-arsed plot device, and it shows. It took me forever to slog through to the end, and I put it down with that vague feeling of empty dissatisfaction you get when you expected chocolate fudge cake and got a sugar-free granola bar that tasted like paper.

As a fan of Waters, I plan to pretend this book never happened.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciate historical fiction that not only gets the atmosphere and historical details right; but one that also gives the characters the sensibilities of their times, is well written, and has a strong story to tell. Waters checks all of these boxes with The Paying Guests. I especially appreciate how she conveys the sense of post-war trauma, the dissolving of class distinctions, and the tension between the pre- and post-war ethoses. She points to the social issues of abandoned war veterans, women's rights, and the illegality of homosexuality. I enjoy her exploration of gender, love/intimacy, and societal norms/expectations. Waters focuses the last part of the novel looking at how fear and the desire for self-preservation may override one's capacity for doing what is moral or right.

The Paying Guests can be thought of as two linked stories. The first is the tale of Frances Wray's reawakening to a new love. The second is a murder investigation and trial for the death of Leonard Barber, the husband of the couple renting rooms in the Wray's home.

Told through Frances' point of view, I never know what the other characters truly think or feel. Frances is a young woman living in genteel poverty with her mother. Her brothers were killed in the war and her father died leaving them in debt. This life is not the one Frances thought she would be leading. She retrieves little bits of herself with her visits in town with her friend Chrissy.

"She loved these walks through London. She seemed, as she made them, to become porous, to soak in detail after detail; or else, like a battery to become charged. Yes, that was it, she thought, as she turned a corner: it wasn't a liquid creeping, it was a tingle, something electric, something produced as if by the friction of her shoes against the streets. She was at her truest, it seemed to her, in these tingling moments."

This particular passage resonates strongly with me as Waters captures the feeling I get walking the streets of New York City. I feel more alive there than any other place I have been.

Circumstance and a spur of the moment decision thrust Frances into a completely foreign situation. She is challenged to see how far she is willing to move from her moral center.

"First her heart started to flutter, then she felt a sort of giving way, around it: a caving in, like the slither of sand through the waist of an hour-glass. It was as if her blood, her muscles, her organs, were steadily dissolving. . . . Now Frances' face was tingling as if growing numb. The caved-in feeling had reached her legs: she had to support herself on the side of the creaking bed. She wanted to be sick. Her heart felt squeezed. . . .she realised that she wasn't dying, she . . . was more afraid than she had ever been before, with a fear that was stronger than any feeling she could remember--grief, anger, passion, love.

How far can this fear drive her?

The Paying Guests has a slow start. Despite my appreciation for Waters beautiful prose and the intricate details she includes to evoke the time period, I would have been happier if it had been trimmed a bit. Once she careens into the crime section, I am hooked and do not want to put the book down.

Publication 2014

[Hanneke · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about this book. I thought it was very boring for too long as nothing really happens in the first 250 pages. True, we get a very atmospheric description of the 1920's, the class system, the devastating result of WW-I on family life and on British society as a whole. However, 100 pages would have been quite enough to present the setting and tell us a silly romance story with lots of secret panting and sighing and groping in the pantry. By page 250 I was tempted to toss the book aside, but didn't as I could not imagine that Sarah Waters was boring us to death. And, sure enough, the story then explodes and becomes interesting, albeit never becomes really exciting. Frances did not invoke any sympathy with me and I did not like it how she pursued Lily, throwing her higher class in as an extra weight. I regret that the wit which made books like Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet so enjoyable is totally lacking in this book. Paul expresses it very well in his review.