Review: Affinity

Synopsis (from http://www.bn.com/): 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 the one apparently Innocent inmate, the enigmatic spiritualist Selina Dawes. Selina was imprisoned after a seance she was conducting went horribly awry, leaving an elderly matron dead and a young woman profoundly 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.

I first learned of author, Sarah Waters, at A Work in Progress. I am not typically drawn to historical fiction, but that review of Fingersmith made it sound too good to resist. I read that book last year and really enjoyed it. There were definitely unexpected plot twists. I think my previous experience with historical fiction was that it was not written in modern English, which slowed down my typically slow reading pace even further. Sarah Waters' books are quick reads.

Last month I picked up Affinity at the library. I finally finished reading it last weekend after an extended break two-thirds of the way through to read Edgar Sawtelle.

The story is told from the journals of Selina and Margaret - Selina's journal kept up to the point of the seance-gone-wrong and Margaret's current journal. It touches on several themes, the first being depression. Depression, and mental illness in general, was not well-understood. Margaret was treated by her mother as being physically frail, and the prescribed charity work was basically an attempt to distract her from her depressed thoughts. The result is that she really just trades one set of troubling thoughts for another.

Hope is a second theme running through the book. People were drawn to Selina as a spiritualist because they believed she helped them connect with deceased loved ones. As she communicated on behalf of the lost loved one, the survivors are given hope that the person still exists out there somewhere and they will see him/her again. Margaret also finds herself drawn to Selina. Their relationship gives Margaret the hope that a life worth living is within her reach, and this becomes her driving force.

There is not much else I can say without giving something away. Consistent with my previous Sarah Waters experience, there is a very unexpected twist at the end of the story, and all along the way things are not what they seem.