Affinity

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Most people won't find the protagonist likable, but that's not a flaw in the characterization: Margaret Prior is neurotic, depressed, impressionable, obsessive, and vulnerable, but that's what drives the plot; if she weren't all those things, there would be no story. I always find it a rather brave move on an author's part when they choose to write from the perspective of a character that most readers won't be able to identify with, but would probably even look at with some measure of contempt. This shouldn’t be a surprise if you’re familiar with Sarah Waters’ writing. She often includes the theme of sexual identity and exploration in her novels. I read The Paying Guests in 2017, and found it more suspenseful and faster paced. Affinity is a slower and more ponderous story, perhaps because of the epistolary style. Selina Dawes, or just Dawes as she’s referred to by the prison matrons, is a younger woman. She’s spent several years working with society women as a spiritualist and medium. Yet, one of those sessions went bad. She was accused, convicted, and sentenced of her crimes. (Spoiler free zone here!) To Margaret, a sad and impressionable sheltered lady, Dawes is a curiosity. Soon, Margaret’s feelings for Dawes grow into much more than that.

Margaret's stark despair and misery really got to me. My heart was breaking for her all throughout. Sarah Waters has an incredible ability to make you care so much for the characters that they almost become real people to you. It seems, I have been reading many deliciously gothic novels recently. Well, I am not complaining! Affinity is yet another addition to my love for anything gothic. Sarah Waters, who is considered the "Queen of Victorian Gothic novels", churns out yet another winner. Waters is no stranger to film adaptations of her work: last year there was the lavishly erotic The Handmaiden, which transported her 2002 novel Fingersmith to 1930s Korea. There was a respectful 2011 BBC version of her fourth novel The Night Watch, and of course Andrew Davies’s “absolutely filthy” 2002 adaptation of her first novel, Tipping the Velvet, which made lesbian sex as much a feature of TV period drama as the Austen ball. “It got my mother using the word dildo, which I think has to be a bit of a victory,” Waters joked at the time. She had a cameo appearance in the series, as she did in the TV adaptation of Fingersmith. “I got to dress up really properly, with the undergarments and everything. It was such a lark.” She doesn’t appear in The Little Stranger, but she was included “at every step” and was very excited to go on set: “It felt a bit awesome really, that my book had spawned this little industry.” It is as if every poet who ever wrote a line to his own love wrote secretly for me, and for Selina. My blood - even as I write this - my blood, my muscle and every fibre of me, is listening, for her. When I sleep, it is to dream of her. When shadows move across my eye, I know them now for shadows of her. My room is still, but never silent - I hear her heart, beating across the night in time to my own. My room is dark, but darkness is different for me now. I know all its depths and textures - darkness like velvet, darkness like felt, darkness bristling as coir or prison wool.”An upper-class woman recovering from a suicide attempt, Margaret Prior has begun visiting the women’s ward of Millbank prison, Victorian London’s grimmest jail, as part of her rehabilitative charity work. Amongst Millbank’s murderers and common thieves, Margaret finds herself increasingly fascinated by on apparently innocent inmate, the enigmatic spiritualist Selina Dawes. Selina was imprisoned after a séance she was conducting went horribly awry, leaving an elderly matron dead and a young woman deeply disturbed. Although initially skeptical of Selina’s gifts, Margaret is soon drawn into a twilight world of ghosts and shadows, unruly spirits and unseemly passions, until she is at last driven to concoct a desperate plot to secure Selina’s freedom, and her own. She’s two years into a new novel, “a kind of cousin to The Little Stranger, but with working-class people”. She’s creeping up the century into the 1950s, a decade she associates fondly with her parents. But again she is drawn to the darkness behind a decade “that seemed so sunny”.

Set in the mid-1870s, Affinity is the story of lonely Margaret Prior. Nearing thirty, unmarried, and recovering from a series of difficult and upsetting events including the death of her beloved father, she takes up the duties of a 'lady visitor' at London's Millbank prison. Assigned to visit, speak with and offer companionship to the female prisoners, she finds herself developing a particular affection for one inmate - Selina Dawes, an alleged medium imprisoned for fraud and assault. At first, Margaret's visits are focused on exploring the unfamiliar environment of the prison and meeting the women incarcerated there, as a distraction from her dull and unhappy home life. However, as her friendship with Selina blossoms and she begins to feel increasingly alienated elsewhere, Millbank becomes the centre of Margaret's world, a growing obsession. Her diary makes up the majority of the narrative, intercut with extracts from Selina's earlier journal recounting the events that led to her imprisonment. Waters explores many themes in Affinity. Margaret is a lady with many privileges, but she cannot break out of her cocoon and truly be herself. Dawes is trying to better herself, but rather than take a traditional job, she needs patronage. Thus, she won’t truly have self-determination upon her release from prison either. Unfortunately, I didn’t care for either character very much. Margaret is weak and whiny. Dawes is just plain untrustworthy and suspicious. With the exception of The Little Stranger, all of her books contain lesbian themes, and she does not mind being labelled a lesbian writer. She said, "I'm writing with a clear lesbian agenda in the novels. It's right there at the heart of the books." Despite this "common agenda in teasing out lesbian stories from parts of history that are regarded as quite heterosexual", [16] she also calls her lesbian protagonists "incidental", due to her own sexual orientation. "That's how it is in my life, and that's how it is, really, for most lesbian and gay people, isn't it? It's sort of just there in your life." [14]

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Overall this Sarah Waters novel is very much like alias Grace but for me less compelling, the Atwood book felt more like an express train building up speed and rushing to the end while this luxuriates in gothic details and the suggestion of sensuality and sexual longing or sometimes power relations between women, which are not disconnected with sex.