Slow thrills

Slow works for ketchup, school zones, dancing with someone you love and The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters.

Readers of modern thrillers expect them to live up to their genre on every page, but you can be more than half way through The Paying Guests before you even realize it might be a thriller. For the first half you think it’s just a lesbian romance, which may be shocking enough for some of us.

Waters uses her slow buildup, with elegant prose, to develop her characters and to make what follows —  sudden violence, a shocking death, a police investigation and a nail-biter of a trial — all the more convincing.

The year is 1922, and the shadow of the Great War still hangs over England. Frances Wray lost two brothers in France, and her father, perhaps from the shock, has also died. She and her mother live alone in a big house. To pay mounting bills they decide to take in lodgers, whom they choose to call paying guests.

Those paying guests turn out to be a flamboyant young couple named Leonard and Lilian Barber. Leonard works for an insurance company but seems, to Frances at least, coarse and seedy.  At first she can’t decide whether the woman is just tacky in her fashion choices and room decor or whether she actually has a keen artistic sense.

With Leonard working long hours and Mrs. Wray frequently gone for charity work or on social calls, the two young women are frequently left alone together and quite gradually become friends, then lovers. The Barber marriage isn’t a happy one, and Lilian is ripe for someone to love. Frances has known she prefers women for several years.

At first the two women just dream of a life together. Finally they decide to make the break, Lilian from her husband, Frances from her mother. Then Lilian learns she is pregnant, which spoils their plans. She decides on a do-it-yourself remedy, which leaves a bloody mess that Leonard finds when he comes home early that night. And so the thriller begins.

This is an exceptional book that will reward the patient reader.