Her literary depictions of domestic life, manners, architecture, class structure, the weight of war and the volatility of love all appear as effortless as they are beautifully executed … The Paying Guests unfolds in a deceptively languid fashion, but its meticulous descriptions and period details are neither arbitrary nor superfluous. Instead, they subtly illustrate how horribly constrained women's lives could be, in an era many associate with flappers and Bright Young Things whizzing from one country house weekend to the next … Waters sets her narrative trap carefully, and when she springs it, more than 300 pages in, The Paying Guests shifts into high gear as smoothly and relentlessly as a Vauxhall touring car overtaking a horse and carriage. As in Rebecca, there's a crime of passion, but instead of a low-key inquest conducted by a sympathetic magistrate, there's a court case with all the tabloid furor of the Amanda Knox trial.
Although Waters is definitely up to constructing a big, entertaining story, her strength seems to be in blueprinting social architecture in terms of its tiniest corners and angles, matters measurable by inches rather than feet — small moments we recognize but have never articulated, even to ourselves … The story is laid out along serious lines — postwar hard times, forbidden love, murder, justice — but it is equally a comic novel. The ridiculous martyrdom of Frances’ chores. The tackiness of Lilian’s wardrobe and décor. The mesmerizing ghastliness of her relatives … Perhaps Waters’s most impressive accomplishment is the authentic feel she achieves, that the telling — whether in its serious, exciting, comic or sexy passages — has no modern tinge.
Maintaining our uncertainty with a virtuosity that makes a short read of a long novel, The Paying Guests frequently references Anna Karenina, casting Frances and Lilian alternately as Kitty and Levin, openly skating their way to domestic bliss, and as Anna and Vronsky, doomed to play out a secret passion that can end only in death … At first it’s easy to fault Waters’ scholarly background for the all-too-realistic pace of the police investigation and courtroom drama that take up the last third of the novel. But the grinding wheels of justice serve to refocus our attention onto Frances and Lilian themselves, resulting in a third act no less gripping than the first. Will the lovers, separated by Lilian’s family and subjected to the uncertainty of a long trial, crack? In The Paying Guests, Waters tilts a mirror toward the decades of gay and lesbian struggle that preceded last year’s landmark decisions.
A novel that initially seems as if it might have been written by E.M. Forster darkens into something by Dostoevsky or Patricia Highsmith. It also becomes unputdownable. Not that the first part is less so; it’s simply slower, more leisurely in its depiction of a troubled marriage and two sad-hearted women who gradually look to each other for companionship, a little conversation, an occasional picnic together … In The Paying Guests she has written both a beautifully delineated love story and a darkly suspenseful psychological novel. While I’ve been coy about revealing too much about how the plot develops, I will just whisper that the reader is in for a seriously heart-pounding roller-coaster ride.
This situation is as unsustainable as it is thrilling—but what are they to do? It is, after all, London in 1922: not an impossible milieu for two women in love, but certainly an inhospitable one. Frances, it emerges, has already given up a great deal—a relationship with another young woman, a writer and activist—to take care of her mother and do all that housework. Sacrifice is in the air, as everyone has sacrificed in the war … The drawn-out noir tale that The Paying Guests becomes is a chilly one, despite the heat at its center. Both Frances and Lilian can seem callous, preoccupied with each other to the point that they don’t care who else gets hurt … But perhaps that’s just what happens when you return to an era where sacrifice was demanded and trace the course of ordinary self-fulfillment instead—this being the modern moral high ground for a woman who falls in love with another woman.
Waters' fiction is full of women like Frances who are missing ‘the man microbe, or whatever it is one needs.’ What makes The Paying Guests special, if not original, is Waters' depiction of a wife trapped in a miserable marriage and slowly coming to terms with her true sexuality … As with all her novels, Waters takes us back to a distant past and excels at transmuting meticulous research into evocative portraits and situations. We marvel at the re-created idiom of the era, the treatment of class (the genteel Wrays vs. the brash Barbers) and delineation of social change, particularly concerning recently enfranchised women … Another gripping and atmospheric triumph from one of Britain's finest storytellers.
Ms. Waters's sixth novel is another tour de force of precisely observed period detail and hidden passions. The author has a keen eye for constrained domesticity; for rapture erupting into daily life. She gives us the pulse of gas through the meter, the rattle of china in the sink, and like Virginia Woolf—another great anatomizer of 1920s interiors and Sapphic attraction—she perceives ‘the tangle’ or interconnectedness of everything: how longing can irradiate the most humdrum scene and love suddenly attend the shaking out of a tablecloth or the stirring of gravy … The pressure that remorse and moral responsibility bring to bear on their love affair is unpacked with exquisite pathos, so that whether their relationship will survive at all remains uncertain until the very last paragraph. It is a finely tweaked conclusion to an unnerving novel in which, in the end, almost everyone pays.
The Paying Guests is long and it starts off slowly, and I wouldn’t blame a reader who put the book aside after a hundred pages or so. But keep going: Waters reels us in, piling up detail after detail, painting a picture of Frances, a character who, like the postwar city she lives in, doesn’t know what the rules are anymore. Told from her point of view, caught together with Lillian in first a dream and then a nightmare, the book becomes a page-turner. You find yourself racing through, wondering how on Earth all this will turn out, worrying about how these two lost, vulnerable women can possibly emerge unscathed … Her depiction of lost love — between Frances and Christina — is deeply moving.
Here's the wondrous secret of The Paying Guests: it's volcanically sexy, sizzingly smart, plenty bloody and just plain irresistible … After a long buildup, Frances and Lilian are madly kissing (and more) in the scullery, and that's just the beginning of trouble. We can't give more away, but the last third of the novel is consumed by a sensational murder trial and continuing, unbearable tension. Somehow, Waters pulls off this improbable feat with fine-tuned prose that's by turns crisply cool and pressure-cooker hot. She conveys an intense intimacy; we feel as though we're living within the confining (and yet liberating) walls of the Wray house.
Even those of us who know Watersland well, its slyness and darkness, its palpable seams, may at first mistake this sixth novel, The Paying Guests, for something quieter, smaller, more easily reviewed. There may be hints – the glint of sex, the creak of danger – but so absorbing is her storytelling, so vivid her characters, that one can temporarily forget that this is not an exhumed relic, or a modern pastiche, where passion is unvoiced and the worst that can happen is loneliness and despair. That is, until one suddenly emerges, blinking, remembering into whose hands you have fallen – those of one of the greatest modern novelists, whose work is full of deceit and stomach-lurching slips into chaos, lives changed utterly by weakness or delay … The nested coincidences like Russian dolls, the misunderstandings on which our lives can tilt, the infinitely regrettable moments: Waters makes us ache for every one.
Waters is a master of the slow build, of the gradual assemblage of tiny random moments that result in a life-altering love. She captures the deep emotion that can underlie the crude mechanics of sex, the poetry that keeps it from being just a midnight merging of limbs and orifices. Forget about Fifty Shades of Grey; this novel is one of the most sensual you will ever read, and all without sacrificing either good taste or a ‘G’ rating … [The Paying Guests] is a book that doubles as a time machine, flinging us back not only to postwar London, but also to our own lost love affairs, the kind that left us breathless — and far too besotted to notice that we had somehow misplaced our moral compass.
Divided into a love story and a crime drama, the two parts are separated by 35 of the grisliest pages I have read in some time. This shift requires some readjustment for the reader, but Waters is so confident – and, line by line, her writing so beautiful, precise and polished – that she sweeps all before her. I succumbed … Waters is particularly good at building up the details of domesticity in an age when there were not yet the labour-saving devices to make it easier and less time-consuming … The growth of Frances and Lilian's relationship is exquisitely handled, and includes detailed set-pieces such as an afternoon ‘rinking’ – rollerskating – and the most eyebrow-raising game of Snakes and Ladders you will ever come across.
Waters dramatises with considerable penetration the new social and sexual ways of being that are emerging with the loss of the old boundaries … This fascinating domestic scenario might have made for an absorbing short novel; but at more than 500 pages long, The Paying Guests has ambitions elsewhere. That these pertain to plot rather than to the development of the novel's core ideas is disappointing, particularly once it becomes clear that the delicate tension between two distinct female types – both of them compromised, yet both yearning for autonomy – in the dawn of the women's rights movement is simply a strategy for fanning the flames as Frances and Mrs Barber progress towards an affair. Waters's plain-spoken description of this relationship immediately begins to undermine the novel's integrity as a period piece: the sexual perspective is designed for the modern reader, and starts to resemble a costume drama.
The pleasures of this sublime romantic melodrama, set in 1922, also lie in its steadily enthralling pace and exquisite period detail, its devastating portrayal of an economically and emotionally battered England after World War I and its vibrant protagonist Frances Wray, a young woman who lives with her mother in their once-grand but now rapidly decaying family home … Though its structure is more straightforward, The Paying Guests shares Fingersmith’s inexorable narrative velocity and erotic power. There is a murder, and there is a trial, and the deliberate buildup to both will fray your nerves and rattle your expectations. Waters expertly evokes doomed love, terror and regret as she examines just how far we’ll go for a chance at happiness.
The Paying Guests is full of ruins, and ruins are important here—as always, Waters nails her metaphors, weaving them into the story effortlessly—the class system of post-WWI Britain is crumbling, the house on Champion Hill is crumbling, Lilian and Leonard’s marriage is crumbling, everything, it seems, is crumbling … The Paying Guests has a different feel than Waters’ earlier novels. The shift is subtle, but this newest is rather sober; the romance between Frances and Lilian, while all consuming and vividly emotional, never veers into that breathy, first-kiss-butterflies territory. The story is imbued with emptiness and absence; even in its most hopeful moments—and there are a few here—a kind of bleakness lurks frighteningly nearby.
The first half of the book slowly builds the suspense as Frances falls for the beautiful and passionate Lilian and teases at the question of whether she will declare her love; when she does, the tension grows even thicker, as the two bump into each other all over the house and try to find time alone for those vivid sex scenes. The second half, as in an Ian McEwan novel, explores the aftermath of a shocking act of violence. Waters is a master of pacing, and her metaphor-laced prose is a delight.
