Frances, who once threw a shoe at a member of parliament during a war protest, has lost not only her brothers, but also the moral clarity of wartime and its attendant momentary whirl of liberation. The First World War afforded women more freedom than they had ever known - big (though limited) freedoms like the vote, and little ones like smoking and bobbing their hair. Waters remains a master of her genre, the historical novel rewritten as a dissection of the individual conscience. Crime enters the novel with a bang at the midway point, and the second half becomes a psychological thriller as Frances struggles to regain control over lives irrevocably altered by her own, sometimes brutal, choices. As Frances finds herself drawn to the beautiful but weak-willed Lilian, her moral certitude begins to crumble away. It's not long, however, before the vividly made-up Lilian Barber smudges the tile, and cinema with Mother is no longer the most exciting thing on the agenda. At the same time, there is a whiff of liberation in the air, as young women, now in surplus of young men to marry, hem up their skirts, shingle their hair, and move to the city to take jobs and apartments. This time, it's London in the '20s, a dingy, careworn city where WWI veterans crank music boxes in the street for spare change, widows gather once a year to leaf through old letters from the front, and the upper classes contrive to hide their little economies from the neighbors.
The setting is, as always, satisfyingly solid. The result is an oddly melancholy pulse-pounder of a novel that feels more personal and raw than her Victorian triptych, even while it delivers the genre goods. After the interesting but not entirely successful "The Night Watch" and "The Little Stranger," which abandoned lesbian themes altogether, Waters' sixth novel returns to her earliest subject matter - the crafting of lesbian identities under hostile social conditions - with a subtler, soberer hand.
It has been five years since Welsh novelist Sarah Waters' last book, but for admirers of her well-crafted Sapphic romps through British history, the wait for "The Paying Guests" has seemed even longer.
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