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Put your spoilers here...
ETA
The best way to read a book with a surprise ending is when you have no idea that it's going to have one. I began to wonder about Ruth, the lady's maid in Selina's diary entries, about half-way through the book, and some time after that I became convinced that she was Peter Quick in disguise, but without Selina's knowledge, and that Selina was a genuine medium whom Ruth had been manipulating and using to commit fraud. I was sure Selina was genuine and at least some of the ghosts were real because of the events involving Margaret (poor lovelorn Margaret.)
The curious thing is that, having now finished the book and knowing the truth about Ruth Vigers and her relationship with Selina, I'm still not sure whether or not Selina really was in touch with spirits, or to what extent she was in league with Ruth with a full knowledge of all her plots, and to what extent Selina too was being manipulated without her knowledge or because she didn't want to know.
One thing which stopped the ending from feeling cheap to me was that even though I'd been passionately rooting all along for Selina and Margaret to run off and be happy in Italy together, even though I knew that by all laws of fiction and plausibility it was destined to end in tragedy, and even though the fraud that was committed on Margaret was a horrible betrayal of trust, which the con artists had to know was likely to cause the reaction that it did-- I was still glad that someone made it to Italy. Even though what they did was awful and wrong, even if Selina was doomed to be betrayed by Ruth in her turn-- I still wanted someone to escape the fate that had been laid on them at birth, to be locked into a jail or a social status or a role that felt like death to them. Even if it was at someone else's expense. Even though I'm not sure that I should feel that way-- and rarely do for characters who manipulate someone by using their love against them.
ETA
The best way to read a book with a surprise ending is when you have no idea that it's going to have one. I began to wonder about Ruth, the lady's maid in Selina's diary entries, about half-way through the book, and some time after that I became convinced that she was Peter Quick in disguise, but without Selina's knowledge, and that Selina was a genuine medium whom Ruth had been manipulating and using to commit fraud. I was sure Selina was genuine and at least some of the ghosts were real because of the events involving Margaret (poor lovelorn Margaret.)
The curious thing is that, having now finished the book and knowing the truth about Ruth Vigers and her relationship with Selina, I'm still not sure whether or not Selina really was in touch with spirits, or to what extent she was in league with Ruth with a full knowledge of all her plots, and to what extent Selina too was being manipulated without her knowledge or because she didn't want to know.
One thing which stopped the ending from feeling cheap to me was that even though I'd been passionately rooting all along for Selina and Margaret to run off and be happy in Italy together, even though I knew that by all laws of fiction and plausibility it was destined to end in tragedy, and even though the fraud that was committed on Margaret was a horrible betrayal of trust, which the con artists had to know was likely to cause the reaction that it did-- I was still glad that someone made it to Italy. Even though what they did was awful and wrong, even if Selina was doomed to be betrayed by Ruth in her turn-- I still wanted someone to escape the fate that had been laid on them at birth, to be locked into a jail or a social status or a role that felt like death to them. Even if it was at someone else's expense. Even though I'm not sure that I should feel that way-- and rarely do for characters who manipulate someone by using their love against them.
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Also, Buttercup does not marry Humperdinck.
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Ye Rant
When I started Affinity, I was immediately reminded of Charlotte Bronte's Villette. Villette has been summarized most neatly by Joanna Russ as 'the story of a prison break in which the prison break never occurs', and Affinity called that to mind; I also thought of the many, many other novels, both nineteenth-century and otherwise, that are based around the 'woman question'.
I can't justify it because it would take a close reading, but I'd find it very hard to read the Waters as not, innately, a political statement, and think it very probably intentionally a political statement due to its similarities to Villette and other things of that sort. I find it hard to believe that the similarities are totally unintentional due to the depth of Waters' research and general knowledge of the era in question.
As a political statement, then, I absolutely and utterly disagree with the conclusion Affinity seems to come to regarding its main character, which seems to be that action, that trust, that even attempting to make that prison break from one's staid and ordinary existence, are things which are bound to redound horribly: better to stay quiet.
Of course, it's possible that the book is not intentionally political in any way, and is meant, as most good novels are, as primarily the story of these particular people, with the political dimensions falling how they will of themselves. There are many books out there that I respect, admire, and even love that work that way, because, after all, didacticism is not the mainstay of great art.
In that case, could someone please offer me a purely artistic justification for the ending twist that isn't 'there will now be a twist for the sake of hopefully surprising the reader and of making the whole book the kind of thoroughly depressing that seems to be required of a serious novel these days'? Yes, it's a well-executed twist. Yes, it has great effects on the impact of the book. But in looking over the book again after I'd read it the first time, the twist did not feel inevitable to me, did not have that sense of necessity to all the characters that I like in a twist ending. I like to feel that I should have been able to extrapolate a twist if only I had not been thrown off by the writer's attempts to keep me from it. The end of Affinity was one of the possibilities I had hypothesized, yes, but it didn't seem to me to have an innate advantage of artistry or probability over the other endings I had hypothesized. This leaves me with the regretful conclusion that Waters was being nasty for the sake of being nasty and the effect that would have on the readers, which is one of the very few things I absolutely cannot forgive an author or a work for.
The word 'gratuitous' comes uncomfortably to mind.
And I am even more annoyed at Waters than I have been at other things that struck me as using this kind of nastiness, because I had read her previous two books and seen great potential and an improvement over the course of her work, and was looking forward to seeing what she was going to do with herself. In my opinion, both Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet suffer from a bit of an internal lack of focus and direction which put me off the excellent prose, characterization, and researched detail: they wandered a bit more than seemed reasonable. Affinity did not wander, but I cannot approve of the directions she aimed for.
I will probably read her next book, but I will be going into it with the supposition that I will probably not like it, and I will be reading it out of the faint hope that she will have decided to take a thoroughly different approach than she has shown so far in her work, and that the concept and structure will finally live up to the beauty of the prose.
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Re: Ye Rant
I did feel like the twist was both inevitable and clever, and that the effect was tragic rather than nasty, but there is really no way to argue feeling, whether yours or mine. I also am very pleased when an author manages to surprise me, so there's that.
It's been so long since I read it that I can't remember the characters' names, let alone offer a close reading, but I think the denouement was foreshadowed by the protagonist's previous experience of betrayal, in which she loved not wisely but too well, well enough to ignore the signs that her lover's hopes of escape and attitudes towards social constraints were not hers, and by the prisoner's previous betrayals of those who trusted her.
The comparison to Villette is interesting and one that hadn't occurred to me. The initial difference that strikes me is class--Lucy Snowe is, of course, barely clinging to the lower edge of middle class, which is one of the major elements of her confinement; Affinity's protagonist is much more wealthy--she would have been one of Lucy's envied and despised students--and the prisoner and her lover much less so.
I don't think there's any doubt that the novel is political; it's very straightforward in its rewriting the Victorian novel as queer, as well as putting forth a very different narrative of class and class war than the Victorian novel tended to.
And I am even more annoyed at Waters than I have been at other things that struck me as using this kind of nastiness, because I had read her previous two books and seen great potential and an improvement over the course of her work, and was looking forward to seeing what she was going to do with herself.
The order of publication is Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, and Fingersmith, so I was disappointed at the lapse into chaos of Fingersmith after the tight structure of Affinity.