|
|
 |
|
"Like
everybody else who has picked it up, I got lost in Sarah Waters'
ingenious Fingersmith..."
|
|
Nick
Hornby, The Guardian Review Books of the Year
|
I
hear that you’re a bit of a Hammer House of Horror fan?
"Certainly am!"
Was Hammer responsible for your love affair with the 19th century?
"Well, I think it was definitely partly responsible... it was
certainly my introduction I suppose to the 19th century and to the
gothic when I was a kid. One of the things I love about the Hammer
films was that they had this very kind of vague grasp of history.
They had kind of busty girls in low cut dresses suitable from any
era really! I suppose I try to be a bit more precise in my books -
but it’s the gothic thing I suppose that I like about Hammer
House of Horror - they're so kind of lurid and they tapped into people's
imaginations.
"As a reader also, I got very much into 19th century fiction
and a book like Fingersmith in particular is very much an attempt
to do a modern re-writing of a particular kind of Victorian novel
/melodrama like The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins."
What
have you discovered about Victorian life that would surprise us?
"Well, things like the extent of prostitution I suppose was
something that was quite shocking about the era. Also, the fact
that middle and upper class men seemed to just assume that working
class women were just there to be seduced and raped or just a sort
of fund of sexual titillation.
"When you read beyond the mainstream fiction of the time, there
were limits to what they could say. If you look at pornography and
erotic memoirs (something like Walters and My Secret Life) Walters,
the narrator, just has endless quite unpleasant encounters with
working women because he just sees them as there for the taking,
and some working women, if they were going to get seduced or raped
they felt that they might as well just turn to prostitution and
make some money out of it. So yes, I think that it's the scale of
women earning money through sex that shocked me most about the 19th
century."
Did
you come across any writer from that period who actually surprised
you and sympathised or empathised with those women suffering through
the sex industry or was it a role pretty much attributed to Dickens?
"Dickens was quite good at it although he was much more concerned
about class than he was about gender. Wilkie Collins was much more
sympathetic to women; I find his women characters quite complicated
and rounded and he was interested in the limits on womens' lives
and also the way in which they could overcome those limits. Men
of the time did get angry about prostitution but of course they
tended to fall back on stereotypes like purity and the whole idea
of fallen women which was not that helpful!"
In Fingersmith there's many heart-stopping moments and lots of
twists - were you in control of these twists?
"Yes, I planned the twists from the beginning - it was good
fun thinking about the impact - I almost twisted my hands with glee…but
it did take a while to get the plot worked out because it is so
complicated, and I started with that first twist and then had to
think about why everyone was involved in the story and what they'd
do."
So,
is this a kind of Waters trademark?
"Well yes, I guess it has been for that book and it has been
for Affinity - Tipping the Velvet, wasn't however, and the book
I'm writing now is kind of complicated but it's not melodrama. I'm
very fond of plotting and I guess it’s the thing that comes
most naturally to me in a way and there will probably always be
an element of that in my work.
"As a reader I like well plotted books and I like to be taken
on this twisted journey and surprised and that’s always been
the kind of fiction that I'd like to write myself."
|
