AFFINITY by SARAH WATERS

AFFINITY

BY SARAH WATERS

THE BLURB:-

'Now you know why you are drawn to me- why your flesh comes creeping to mine and what it comes for. Let it creep.'

From the dark heart of a Victorian prison, disgraced spiritualist Selina Dawes waves an enigmatic spell. Is she a fraud or a prodigy? By the time it all begins to matter, you'll find yourself desperately wanting to believe in magic.

THE REALITY:-

Yawn.. This novel really knew how to draw itself out. After 30 pages I put it to one side and read another book from start to finish. I picked up the thread quite easily, but I could not really get into this story until about page 100.  Even then, I found myself surreptitiously looking to check what page I was on- and therefore how many I had left to go!

I've read Tipping The Velvet (very good), Fingersmith (very good), The Nightwatch (good but drawn out and tedious) and The Little Stranger (okay) by the same author and have seen the television adaptations of the first three. I have to say that these stories come across a lot better on TV than on paper. I'm all for descriptiveness and getting into the minds of the characters but this author can certainly make things drag a bit.

I loved the subject matter and have always believed in ghosts. Why? Not just because I have seen one (a very well-documented grey lady in a haunted hotel in Norfolk) but because I like to keep an open mind about such things and there are too many recorded sightings of ghosts to dismiss the matter completely. I know the Victorians found the supernatural fascinating and I also know that there were a lot of fraudsters about who took advantage of such things. The London location of a grim female prison was enthralling and the characters interesting; Selina being one hell of an enigmatic, talented actress...

I could see the fact that (spoiler alert!) Margaret was going to be defrauded coming and that would have been true had I not previously read a review of this book that revealed one of the protagonists. I suspected that this villain (or maybe villain's puppet?) of the piece was in cahoots with someone in Margaret's house but I didn't work out that these two people were actually one and the same, and now I've read the novel it seems so obvious.

It wasn't until page 329 (23 pages from the end!) that the book started to get really enthralling, which was, unfortunately a bit too long a wait. I also felt very daft in missing the fact that not all the prison officers were going to be as white as snow and as honest as the day is long- in retrospect it is something stupidly obvious to overlook!

A word to the author- find another adjective other than queer. I saw it used so many times that I was tempted to highlight the “queers” and count them later. Fortunately, a search online revealed that that task had already been done and forty uses of queer in one novel is way too much. We know that you're a lesbian and we don't care, so please give the double-entendre references a rest.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN by LIONEL SHRIVER

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

BY LIONEL SHRIVER

THE BLURB:-

Shortly before his sixteenth birthday, Kevin Khatchadourian kills seven of his fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker and a teacher. He is visited in prison by his mother, Eva, who narrates in a series of letters to her estranged husband, Franklin, the story of Kevin's upbringing. For this powerful, shocking novel, Lionel Shriver was awarded the Orange Prize for fiction.

THE REALITY:-

Uurrgghh!! I was so glad when I finished this novel! Why? Was it awful? No, it was bloody brilliant but the subject matter was too horrific for words.

I must confess, I have already seen the film of the same name, so I knew the story, so certain aspects that are meant to come as a surprise at the end, things regarding Franklin and Celia, did not. I described the film as “powerful and disturbing” (incidentally, great acting performances across the board) and the book is also the same. In places, I did find it almost too detailed (I'm a hypocrite, I know, as my work is also very in-depth and I tend to prefer this approach to heavily edited work) and too much about psycho-babble, but I suppose that is the whole point of the novel- to try to get inside Eva's and Kevin's heads.

Nature or nurture? I think at least 90-95% nature, if not more. As one of the other mothers of an incarcerated teen put it (affect a southern USA accent), 'Some kids just damned mean.' Was Eva's failure to bond with her son from day one her fault? No. I don't think so. In many ways, even as a newborn, Kevin seemed to repel her rather than the other way round and it must be difficult to continually have to try and express love to someone who doesn't seem to want it and who rejects you quite nastily. In any other relationship a human being will walk (though to be honest, I'm surprised Eva didn't- she must have been tempted to have this little shit thrown into the care system.)

A very, very exemplary novel. Worth a read but be warned- it will give you nightmares.