Affinity

After leaving it to fester for months, I finally decided that the time was right to read Sarah Water's second Victorian novel, the wonderfully gloomy Affinity.

Recovering from a never-quite-specified bout of nervous illness, brought on by her father's death and her girlfriend's decision to marry her brother, Margaret Prior becomes a prison visitor at Millbank Prison. With life in her mother's house becoming increasingly claustrophobic, Margaret soon finds herself obsessed with the dank prison, its endless corridors and by strangely symmetrical symmetry that seems to make the wardresses just as much prisoners of the gaol as the inmates. Gradually, as she gets to know the prisoners, Margaret finds herself becoming increasingly obsessed with one in particular: the disgraced medium, Selina Dawes.

Impressed by Dawes' demeanour and the accuracy of her knowledge, the sceptical Margaret gradually finds herself won round to the spiritualist's cause. After a relapse of her nervous illness, triggered by her own feelings of imprisonment and her growing love for Dawes, Margaret finds herself embarking on an absurd plan to escape from her pedestrian existence in gloomy London and travel to Italy to study Renaissance art.

Affinity is a wonderfully brooding gothic novel presided over by the dark marshy spirit of Millbank, which comes to dominate the existence of all the characters. The spirits of the dead, too, pervade the book, with much coyness as to whether they really exist — yes, Dawes admits early on to knowing a few tricks that can liven up a séance, but she's equally adamant that they're only used on the days when the spirits don't feel up to putting in a personal appearance.

But the gothic elements are also treated, occasionally, in a knowing fashion. At one point, Margaret worries that she might have mislaid an item in her sleep, as Franklin Blake did in The Moonstone; at another she wonders, naively, whether all the drugs provided by her doctor — chloral hydrate and laudanum — might be habit forming!

The main characters, Margaret and Selina, through whose journals the story unfolds, are both well rather wonderful. Margaret comes across as a bookish and independent woman oppressed by the rigid caste rules of the Victorian upper classes. At the start of the novel, she's strong, determined and funny, with a sharp sense of humour. As the callousness of Millbank and her doctor's over-fondness for addictive medicines begin to take their toll on her nerves, she gradually changes from a clear minded rationalist to an intensely emotional and immediate gothic heroine. Selina, despite a number of entries from her journal and all Margaret's descriptions of her, remains suitably enigmatic: her journal entries may be unreliable — not an unreasonable assumption given that she's in prison for fraud — while Margaret's observations are inevitably coloured by her growing obsession.

Affinity is an excellent novel, which I enjoyed all the more for having recently seen Andrew Davies' film adaptation. For although the film caught the mood of the book rather well, the inevitable process of abridgement lost a great deal of the subtlety of the book — in particular Margaret's decent into near-madness — and over emphasised some of the other elements. So the advice is, as ever, if you liked the film, you'll probably like the original novel even more...