SARAH WATERS
As The Little Stranger makes the leap from page to screen in a critically acclaimed adaptation, this renowned author continues to shape the cultural landscape with her subtly subversive novels. By Erica Wagner
The London Library is the perfect place to meet Sarah Waters. We’re both members of this gem, founded by Thomas Carlyle in 1841. There is a Tardis quality to the place, the great columns of its stacks opening out behind the modest façade on St James’s Square. You can browse the open shelves here, as Waters did when researching her 2014 novel The Paying Guests, which is set in 1920s London. She read a lot of fiction, popular during the period, that hasn’t necessarily stood the test of time, mentioning Warwick Deeping, who published more than 60 novels, quite a few of them bestsellers. Work like Deeping’s dates, she says, for the very reasons that made it successful. ‘Books are often bestsellers because they press buttons of gender and class – things I’m very interested in – but they fade because our ideas about what is appropriate have changed so quickly in the last 100 years.’
Perhaps some of those changes have come about thanks to the work of our Writer of the Year. Her first novel, Tipping the Velvet, appeared exactly 20 years ago: there had never been anything like it. Combining history, adventure and lesbian romance, it exhibited what might be called frolicsome scholarship. From the outset, her writing was garlanded with awards and ripe for all sorts of literary adaptation: Fingersmith, shortlisted for both the Man Booker and Orange Prizes in 2002, was made into a two-part BBC series in 2005, but it was also the inspiration for Park Chan-Wook’s erotic cinematic thriller The Handmaiden, set in Japanese-occupied Korea.
And our conversation takes place just days before the release of The Little Stranger, Lenny Abrahamson’s film adaptation of her gripping 2009 novel. Starring Domnhall Gleeson and a luminous Ruth Wilson, it is an eerie psychological ghost story set in the immediate aftermath of World War II. When Gleeson’s Dr Faraday goes to investigate a medical mystery at Hundreds Hall, a grand house fallen on hard times, he succumbs to the place’s spell – it would be a shame to give away absolutely anything more. Waters is thrilled with the film. She was happy to observe as Lucinda Coxon’s script developed, giving a bit of feedback, she says, mostly about historical details; but otherwise allowing Abrahamson and Coxon to get on with it. When she walked onto the set of Hundreds Hall, she says, ‘it wasn’t anything like I’d imagined it – except for the spirit’ (which is of course the trick). ‘That’s really the same with casting,’ she adds. ‘Domnhall wasn’t at all like I’d pictured, or how I described Faraday – but it’s much more about presence than physical detail.’
Her own attention to detail is meticulous: it’s hard to think of a novelist who has brought so many past eras so vividly to life, and who has had such a role in bringing formerly marginalised voices into the mainstream. That her project no longer seems unusual is a testament to what she has achieved. ‘When I started off there was… I don’t want to say there was an urgency about it, because it was more fun than that! But there were stories to be told that hadn’t been told in popular culture; gay history that I’d seen in academia but never anywhere else. So it seemed like an exciting thing to be doing. Even though I was making those stories up, it still felt like they were airing something that hadn’t been aired before.’ If that seems less radical in the UK now, she adds, there are still many places in the world where ‘there’s still a real urgency about asserting a gay past, as well as a gay present and a gay future’.
More than anything else, her tales are enthralling stories about fascinating characters, and that is what will ensure that her own novels are built to last. A book that endures, she muses, is both ‘of its moment and yet larger than that’ – as good a way as any to describe Waters’ own work.