Affinity

Affinity
by Sarah Waters

Affinity
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Book Summary Information

Author: Sarah Waters
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2002-01-08
ISBN: 1573228737
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Riverhead Trade

Book Reviews of Affinity

Book Review: Great pace and story
Summary: 5 Stars

Pace and a good story, that's all I want and this book delivers. Miss Margaret Prior, recovering from some personal shock, is advised to spend some time visiting a women's prison in London. There she meets a number of colourful characters appropriately reeking of Dickens and Bronte. She becomes obsessed and taken in by a particularly stunning and suffering young lady who possesses spiritual powers. It is because of these gifts that this alluringly pale Miss Dawes is now serving time, having conducted a seance that went awry, to put it simply. Miss Prior visits regularly, speculates and finally plots an escape for Miss Dawes. Here the plot cannot be revealed but I don't mention pace and story for nothing. Wonderful stuff! You expect The Woman in White or the theatrical The Woman in Black, anything to satisfy the desire and expectation of the macabre and other-worldly, but this is a more bitter and realistic story.

Juicy depiction of 19th century London, of contrasts between life on Cheyne Walk and life in the prison near London Bridge, of life at home as a spinster daughter to a difficult mother, of a love that cannot even be defined let alone nurtured.

I didn't think I would be taken in by the occult subject of this book, but the historical details and characters are so vivid that I was completely charmed. Sarah Waters is a top writer. I've read them all and can't wait for more of her books.

Summary of Affinity

An upper-class woman, recovering from a suicide attempt, visits the women's ward of Millbank prison as part of her rehabilitation. There she meets Selina, an enigmatic spiritualist-and becomes 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.

"Unfolds sinuously and ominously...a powerful plot-twister. The book is multidimensional: a naturalistic look at Victorian society; a truly suspenseful tale of terror; and a piece of elegant, thinly veiled erotica." (USA Today)

"Gothic tale, psychological study, puzzle narrative-Sarah Waters' second novel is all of these wrapped into one, served up to superbly suspenseful and hypnotic effect." (The Seattle Times)
Affinity is a tale of power and possession that Henry James himself might admire. In her first novel, Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters explored secrets and longing--capping off this lesbian romp with a utopian-socialist vision. Her intricate follow-up is just as sensual but infinitely darker, its moral more difficult to descry. Its stylistic and psychological rewards, however, are visible at every turn, the author's persuasive imagination matched by her gift for storytelling.

In late September 1874, Margaret Prior makes her way through the pentagons of London's Millbank Prison, a place of fearful symmetry and endless corridors. This plain woman on the verge of 30 has come to comfort those behind bars, several of whom Waters brings to instant, sad life. And our Lady Visitor plans to take her role dead seriously, having recovered from two years of nervous indolence in her family's Chelsea house. One person, however, makes her job a passion. Opening an inspection slit (or "eye" as these devices are known), Margaret hears "a perfect sigh, like a sigh in a story." Peering inward, she's confronted by the most erotic of visions--a woman turned toward the sun, caressing her cheek with a forbidden violet: "As I watched, she put the flower to her lips, and breathed upon it, and the purple of the petals gave a quiver and seemed to glow..."

Selina Dawes may indeed have the face of a Crivelli angel, but this medium is in for fraud and assault, her last session having gone very badly indeed. Suffice it to say that the first full encounter between these two very different women is enthralling. "You think spiritualism a kind of fancy," Selina riddles. "Doesn't it seem to you, now you are here, that anything might be real, since Millbank is?" And soon enough Margaret receives several viable signs of the supernatural: a locket disappears from her room, flowers mysteriously appear, and her dazzling friend knows everything about her. Strangest of all, Selina seems to love her.

As Margaret records her weekly prison forays, her own past comes into focus, notably her plans to travel to Italy with her first love (who is now her sister-in-law). But her current journal, she convinces herself, is to be very different from her last one, which "took as long to burn as human hearts, they say, do take." Meanwhile, Waters offers a narrative two-for-one, placing Margaret's diary cheek by jowl with Selina's chronicle of her pre-Millbank existence. This dispassionate, staccato record initially suggests that we can separate truth from desire. Or can we? What Waters's haunting creation leaves us with is a more painful reality--that knowledge and belief are entirely different things. --Kerry Fried

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