Books: A journal of two very different hearts

Affinity by Sarah Waters Virago pounds 9.99

Sarah Waters' first novel, Tipping the Velvet, proved her to be a talented, elegant and hugely entertaining writer. Her second, Affinity, shows that she's also a versatile one. She's clearly at home in 19th-century London: Tipping the Velvet was set at the turn of the century, and Affinity takes place just 30 years earlier. But while the first was a sexy, irrepressible romp through working-class Edwardian music hall, this is an altogether more refined, repressed and simmering work; a delicious tale of Victorian spiritualism, murky goings-on in women's prisons, hysteria, drugs and doomed gothic romance. It's a journal of the heart, as Victorian ladies' diaries used to be dubbed. But, more accurately, this is a journal of two hearts.

It's also a mystery story with a nasty kick. Margaret Prior, a bourgeois bluestocking with discreet lesbian leanings, is in need of distraction. Her beloved father, who so encouraged her learning, has died. Her beloved Helen, with whom she exchanged such passionate and private kisses, has married her brother. Her younger sister is getting married as soon as mourning protocol allows, which will leave her only with an endless and intolerable future as her mother's "consolation". No wonder she takes an overdose of morphia. If it were only 20 years later she could have been a Freudian case study. As it is, she seeks a worthy cause.

Our heroine becomes a Lady Visitor at Millbank Prison, one of the grimmest jails in London. It's with a beating and fiercely bleeding heart that she leaves the stifling air of Cheyne Walk to enter a parallel territory of female confinement.

Here, within Millbank's pentagonal, haunted towers, she meets the stock characters of Victorian prison horror drama: the benign governor, the sadistic screw, and the ghostly gatekeeper, with his ominous tales of the rising river and spontaneously cracking walls and windows. She meets the long servers - poisoners, vitriol-throwers, child-murderers - and the petty regulars - pickpockets, prostitutes and counterfeiters.

She also meets the enigmatic Selina Dawes, celebrated trance medium, who seems to offer her a different kind of world altogether: a desperately appealing world of freedom and spiritual passion; an affinity of the soul. "We are the same, you and I," whispers Selina to her entranced Lady Visitor. "We have been cut, two halves, from the same piece of shining matter." Selina promises them both escape. She promises a way they might always be together. "You need only want me," she breathes, "and I will come."

The tale might simply be good pastiche if it were not so well done. Waters wears her research lightly, but clearly relishes every moment of her forays into Millbank's sinister nooks and crannies. Wax, lime and sticky fog stain every claustrophic page. Her skill is in taking the conventions and cliches of several genres at once - lady's journal, ghost story, mystery, romance - and drawing them together in an irresistible narrative, building the momentum of unravelling repression to a fevered - albeit ladylike - climax. Is Selina the real thing, or just a hustler with a little supernatural talent and a lot of charm? Is Margaret sane, lucid and inspired, or, after all, just a middle-class female hysteric hallucinating on laudanum? It could be true love. It could be just a very long con. By the time it begins to matter, we desperately want to believe in magic.

I suspect that readers of Tipping the Velvet who are looking for more of the same might be disappointed by Affinity's lack of saucy fin-de-siecle lesbian sex, risque cross-dressing and flagrant queer transgression (although there are some delightfully perverse moments where spiritual seance meets lesbian s/m floor show). But they really shouldn't be. Waters is smart enough to know where her readers' sympathies lie, and, even smarter, she has every intention of shamelessly manipulating them. She's a strong and original voice and a consummate storyteller, and she obviously has a lot more up her writing sleeve. As for whether or not our tale has a happy ending - well that depends, dear reader, on your view of the world.