September 2022. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
769 pages, Little, Brown, 2002. Written in English, read in English.
I love novels that take you back in history and don’t make a fuss about it. Fingersmith, luckily for me, is one of those — it takes place in the darker, narrower streets of south London, in mid 19th century. We meet Sue Trinder, one of the two protagonists, right away among the crowds leaving a theater after a performance. She is an apprentice pickpocket, and after a semi-successful attempt at her craft, which provides the name for the novel, she makes her Dickensian way to a house in which a collective of thieves, pickpockets, forgers, co-habit, protected and guided by a Fagin-like matron named Mrs. Sucksby. Sue is an orphan who has lived with Mrs. Sucksby, whose main business is to receive unwanted babies and raise them in a makeshift orphanage for the purpose of selling them or using them as members of her underground cadre, almost since she was born.
A fellow named Gentleman comes into the picture early in the arc of the novel. He has a plot that would make him rich, and he needs Sue’s help to execute that plot, of which fortune she will gain a considerable portion. The plot involves Maud Lilly, a well-to-do young woman, also an orphan, whose fortune is controlled by her uncle with whom she lives, but which will be freed to her husband once she is married. Sue is entrusted to become her maid, so she can direct her to make the right decision in marrying Gentleman and securing the fortune, committing Maud into an insane asylum in the process.
Sue travels to a country estate in which Maud lives with her uncle, to become her maid. Of course, the narrative that I’ve described so far is not enough to hold an entire novel and all sorts of plot entanglements ensue, including both protagonists falling in love with each other.
The first person narrative alternates between the two protagonists, revealing a little more of the backstory of each of them — one of the charms of the novel is that the plot twists are both very predictable, and very surprising, resulting in the readers knowing in advance, sometimes, what is going to happen, but not how the novel is going to arrive there.
The end, which I will not reveal here, settles a few things and disturbs others, and in its way highlights and seals some discussions that are hovering in the sidelines of the novel, about the position and clout of women in Victorian England, about the false nobility that heredity and money entitle, about what character has virtue and what constitutes a villain, and about what a happy ending really is.
The October 2022 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be The Waste Land by T.S. Elliot.
The November 2022 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.
