Among The Jumbled Heap

Fingersmith is the type of literary novel that’s not being written much these days, a style that fits more with the age of Queen Victoria than the age of Global Terrorism, and therein lies its beauty.

Set in nineteenth century England, Fingersmith narrates the intersecting stories of two young women in seemingly disparate circumstances. Sarah Trindle is a fingersmith, a thief, living in a house of thieves and raised by Mrs. Sucksby, who dotes on the girl as if she were her own daughter, even though Mrs. Sucksby’s business is that of selling unwanted babies.

Susan’s birth mother was hanged as a murdress when Sue was an infant, and Sue grows up feeling that ‘bad blood’ within her. She learns the thieving arts, but is kept from the worst of it by Mrs. Sucksby, who insists that one day Sue would bring them all a “great fortune.”

Susan is seventeen when a friend of her family of thieves arrives on a dark and stormy night–when else?–with a plot to make them all rich, a plot that can only be carried through with Susan’s help. The man is Gentleman, a name he got because he is supposed to be the disinherited scion of a wealthy family.

Gentleman’s plan is simple. There is a wealthy heiress who lives alone with her scholar uncle in a dilapidated mansion outside London. This is Maud Lilly, the other heroine of the story. Maud is seemingly innocent, an ingenue living a cloistered life of servitude to her uncle who longs for love and freedom. She has a guarantee of a great inheritance from her dead mother, but she can only receive the money after her marriage. Gentleman pruposes to seduce Maud, marry her, and have her committed to the madhouse, thus securing her fortune for himself. To carry off his plan, he needs someone on the inside, a young lady to act as Maud’s maid, speak well of him, and gently guide Maud’s heart to him. Sue, he says, is the perfect accomplice.

Thus, the plan is hatched.

Fingersmith is an exhilarating read, a handsomely crafted historical romance. Sue’s roughspeak, her Borough talk, suck the reader deeper into her life. One feels her cares, sees her qualms and feels the her hesitation as the plot clicks into place like the tumbler’s of a lock.

Then comes page 160. Everything changes. Those first 159 pages have been a pleasant character study. The reader has gazed into the life of our young would-be charlatan and glimpsed her soul, on par with Crime and Punishment.

But Sarah Waters is most often compared to Dickens not Dostoevsky, and it is at page 160 that one sees why. It is not the Victorian setting or the depictions of seedy, thieving London. It is the intensity of her plot.

When I was about the age of Pip, I found myself at play in the fields of Dickens for the first time. I was reading Great Expectations, and Dickens sucked me into that ever turning plot. He led me on wtih speculation. Was Mrs. Haversham Pip’s benefactor? My favorite scene is when Pip dines with the solicitor who serves as his liaison to the unnamed benefactor. The solicitor begins to stir his drink with a metal file?! Ahhhh, the criminal in the marsh? Could it be? What will be next?

I experienced this same sense of the pleasure of discovery while reading Fingersmith. Everything that follows page 160 electrifies. There are more twists here than the halls of the Vatican, and around each corner a new revelation. To use the cliche that I couldn’t put the book down is to insult Water’s irresistible prose. This book was epoxied to my hands, and I have not felt so attached to a story in years.