Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters

“More twists than Oliver…”

Sarah Waters pens a delightfully dishonest swindle story involving crossed lovers, set in Victorian England.

Here’s the game.  Sue Trinder adores her home on Lant Street.  Mrs. Sucksby dotes on Sue when not quieting babies she farms for spare income with teaspoons of gin.  Mr. Ibbs stays in the crowded kitchen, where London’s lowlife come to fence him stolen goods.  Teenagers John and Dainty bicker.  Despite growing up in a den of thieves, Sue seems younger than her seventeen years, a pointy-chinned gamin.

Then, one day, A Stranger Comes to Town, and he’s got a proposition.  This confidence man, who goes by the name “Gentleman”, has picked out as his mark one Maud Lilly, a simpleton whose eccentric bibliophile uncle has trained as an in-house secretary.  Gentlemen means to marry Maud for her fortune, which she cannot yet access due to her youth, and then dump her in a women’s madhouse.  To pull off his One Last Job, he wants Sue to play undercover wingman as Maud’s new maid, in return for a share of the booty.  Sue says yes.  Gentlemen names Sue “Fingersmith,” a reference to pickpocketing in particular, and a duplicitous person in general.

If the setup sounds like something from Oliver Twist, you’re right.  In fact, if you miss the parallels, Waters makes these references for you at both the beginning and end of the book.  She forgoes a bad community theater Cockney dialect in favor of what sounds like a more authentic ear for dialogue, however, thank the Dickens.

Once the dastardly duo arrive at Maud’s house, the plan of course goes haywire: the wrong people fall in love (the really wrong people). Let the tricksy twists commence. What we thought was the super-objective turns out to be the setup.

We’re only up to page 150 out of 500, after all.

Waters does not go to great lengths to hide the ensuing hairpin turns.  As early as the exposition, Sue reflects, “When I try now to sort out who knew what and who knew nothing, who knew everything and who was a fraud, I have to stop and give it up, it makes my head spin.”  In the same way that horror movies broadcast oncoming jump scares that make strange noises come out of your mouth when they arrive anyway, Waters torques you so hard that the turnarounds surprise you regardless of their highway-sized road signs.

So that part’s fine.

Unfortunately, Waters shifts narrators at each of the plot points, which coincides with Parts I-III of the novel, as well as the story’s three-act structure.  In the case of the second part, we circle back to Go without collecting $200 and redo the first third of the book.  Sure, seeing the double-double-cross from the other side is fun, but running laps on what amounts to a circular track kills the story’s momentum.  Later reveals never quite make up for the lost pace.  Also, without giving away too much, turns out when you imprison characters across multiple chapters, not much can happen (mea culpa, I’ve made the same mistake in my own fiction).

Since Waters penned Fingersmith in 2002, dueling POV has become de facto standard across swaths of genre fiction among the emerging generations who still read, which pretty much means romance fans.  And yes, Fingersmith is, beneath its bodice, a romance, following the beat structure of the form to a calligraphic tee.  The “B-plot” isn’t fast-paced enough for it to masquerade as a thriller like Gillian Flynn’s romance money machine Gone Girl, but you’d have to at least put it in the same category.

Maybe cell phones have something to do with the alternating POV trend.  Just as people have wired their brains to think in terms of social media handles, they want characters in books to serve as avatars they can port into with as little friction as possible.  Dueling 1st person POV relieves cognitive load for readers, while letting writers inflate word counts, as in the case of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program (aka “Netflix for books”) where indie authors receive royalties from sales + total pages read. We have returned to Dickens, who earned by the word.

Please note that the book involves a lot of hitting, and the main takeaway, after the love story, appears to be a critique of Victorian male anxiety about the dangers of allowing women to have access to books.

As far as matters of style, Waters (who has read many books) knows what she’s about. Her command of craft is patent.  Check out this extended metaphor that Maud drops on us:

“We are not meant for common usage, my fellow books and I.  My uncle keeps us separate from the world.  He will call us poisons; he says we will hurt unguarded eyes.  Then again, he names us his children, his foundlings, that have come to him, from every corner of the world—some rich and handsomely provided for, some shabby, some injured, some broken about the spine, some gaudy, some gross.  For all that he speaks against them, I believe he likes the gross ones best; for they are the ones that other parents—other bookmen and collectors, I mean—cast out.”

Wow!

I won’t give away any more spoilers, but the climactic twist turns out to be a familiar device that you’ll recognize when you get to it (hint: Mark Twain).  The novel suffers from overlong scenes of angst redolent of Victorian melodrama, and at various points you feel that people could solve most of their problems if they just talked to each other.  Granted, doing so wouldn’t be very British, and moreover, we wouldn’t have fiction if they did.

In sum, I’m fine with hybridized genres and I enjoyed this romancey take on the con-artist shtick.  Fingersmith’s backbends taste delicious, titillating without becoming tawdry, and they keep coming up to and including the final sentence.  The pages turn quick.  I just could have done without the sop to shrinking attention spans in the POV department.