The Paying Guests

Sarah Waters' The Paying Guests is a disappointed novel, by which I do not mean that it is disappointing.  Rather, the novel exudes postwar exhaustion and cynicism, from the relationships between the characters to the decaying house that our protagonist, Frances Wray, attempts to keep from crumbling into dust.  Asked about her lost "plans," Frances exclaims, "[t]o change the world! To put things right! To--I've forgotten" (85).  Frances' inability to remember what, in retrospect, sound like the cliched dreams of every stereotypical radical youth, suggests that her youthful ardor for political transformation (eventually called into question later in the novel) has not disappeared so much as abruptly deflated, like a popped souffle.  Postwar England has changed, to be sure, but "in such disappointing ways" (85).  It's no wonder that Frances, who is in her mid-twenties, comes across as prematurely middle-aged.  More to the point, the plot suggests that Frances has not perhaps learned much from this sudden deflation of youthful romance into gray reality.  The sudden entry of Anna Karenina, jointly read by Frances and her lodger Lilian Barber, promises a spectacular flameout for the novel's plot that, after all, does not come quite as one might expect.  ("We're like Anna and Vronsky" [232], Lilian suggests, before immediately retracting.  Perhaps not.)

Although the novel's characters traipse all over London, much of the book's action centers immediately in and around the Wray house, where Frances and her mother have been reduced to taking in lodgers ("paying guests"). So much of the novel is devoted to the sheer labor required for maintaining the house, not least because the Wrays can no longer afford a servant; Frances' wrecked hands, attached to her shabbily yet genteely-clad body, announce the family's increasingly precarious financial position.   Frances cleans, she scrubs, she dusts.   Significantly, Frances' much-loathed dead father (who, interestingly enough, died as a parody of the Victorian female invalid) had loaded the house with "Victorian fakes" masquerading as "Jacobean" furniture (23): Frances is stuck with the burden of burnishing up a mere fiction of the past (itself out of place, we are told, given the house's actual architecture) that carries no actual value.  We are warned early on, then, that the stories people try to tell about history can take on an oppressive life of their own, occupying spaces that might otherwise be literally or figuratively cleaned up.   Mrs. Wray's enduring paeans to her dead husband, an unpleasant man who left his wife and daughter nearly bankrupt, constitute one such fiction.  But Frances' own past also suggests fakery: her suffragist activism was unaccompanied by any actual willingness to rebel, in the end, against social norms.  "I'd have liked it if," says her rejected lover Christina, "when faced with a choice between me and a life of buns and parish bazaars and games of two-handed patience with your mother, you had chosen me" (240).  Christina translates Frances' "life" into something that sounds suspiciously Victorian in its own right, reduced to the littleness of Anglican and domestic routine.  Christina, unlike Frances, inhabits a shabby rented room conspicuous by the lack of cleaning, scrubbing, or dusting; her more avant-garde lifestyle with her new lover, a ceramics artist, does not come equipped with any historic attachment to place.

Although the novel's lesbian romance plot will hardly be a shock for anyone familiar with Waters' work, I'm going to wade into spoiler-infested waters, so the rest of this post will lurk beneath the fold.