Reading the Watermark by Sam Mills for the Times
“Every time I encounter someone,” celebrity novelist Augustus Fate reveals, near the start of Sam Mills’s new novel The Watermark, “ I feel a nagging urge to put them in one of my books.”
He speaks nothing less than the literal truth. Journalist and music-industry type Jaime Lancia and his almost-girlfriend, a suicidally inclined artist called Rachel Levy, have both succumbed to Fate’s drugged tea, and while their barely-alive bodies are wasting away in the attic of his Welsh cottage, their spirits are being consigned to a curious half-life as fictional characters. It takes a while for them to awake to their plight, trapped in Thomas Turridge, Fate’s unfinished (and probably unfinishable) Victorianate new novel. The malignant appetites of this paperback Prospero have swallowed rival novelists, too, making Thomas Turridge only the first of several ur-fictional rabbit holes down which Jaime and Rachel must tumble.
Over the not inconsiderable span of The Watermark, we find our star-crossed lovers evading asylum orders in Victorian Oxford, resisting the blandishments of a fictional present-day Manchester, surviving spiritual extinction in a pre-Soviet hell-hole evocatively dubbed “Carpathia”, and coming domestically unstuck in a care robot-infested near-future London.
Meta-fictions are having a moment. The other day I saw Bertrand Bonello’s new science fiction film The Beast, which has Léa Seydoux and George MacKay playing multiple versions of themselves in a tale that spans generations and which ends, yes, in a care-robot-infested future. Perhaps this coincidence is no more than a sign of the coming-to-maturity of a generation who (finally!) understand science fiction.
In 1957 Philip Dick wrote a short sweet novel called Eye in the Sky, which drove its cast through eight different subjective realities, each one “ruled” by a different character. While Mills’s The Watermark is no mere homage to that or any other book, it’s obvious she knows how to tap, here and there, into Dick’s madcap energy, in pursuit of her own game.
The Watermark is told variously from Jaime and Rachel’s point of view. In some worlds, Jaime wakes up to their plight and must disenchant Rachel. In other worlds, Rachel is the knower, Jaime the amnesiac. Being fictional characters as well as real-life kidnap victims, they must constantly be contending with the spurious backstories each fiction lumbers on them. These aren’t always easy to throw over. In one fiction, Jaime and Rachel have a son. Are they really going to abandon him, just so they can save their real lives?
Jaime, over the course of his many transmogrifications, is inclined to fight for his freedom. Rachel is inclined to bed down in fictional worlds that, while existentially unfree, are an improvement on real life — from which she’s already tried to escape by suicide.
The point of all this is to show how we hedge our lives around with stories, not because they are comforting (although they often are) but because stories are necessary: without them, we wouldn’t understand anything about ourselves or each other. Stories are thinking. By far the strongest fictional environment here is 1920s-era Carpathia. Here, a totalitarian regime grinds the star-crossed couple’s necessary fictions to dust, until at last they take psychic refuge in the bodies of wolves and birds.
The Watermark never quite coheres. It takes a conceit best suited to a 1950s-era science-fiction novelette (will our heroes make it back to the real world?), couples it to a psychological thriller (what’s up with Rachel?), and runs this curious algorithm through the fictive mill not once but five times, by which time the reader may well have had a surfeit of “variations on a theme”. Rightly, for a novel of this scope and ambition, Mills serves up a number of false endings on the way to her denouement, and the one that rings most psychologically true is also the most bathetic: “We were supposed to be having our grand love story, married and happy ever after,” Rachel observes, from the perspective of a fictional year 2049, “but we ended up like every other screwed-up middle-aged couple.”
It would be easy to write off The Watermark as a literary trifle. But I like trifle, and I especially appreciate how Mills’s protagonists treat their absurd bind with absolute seriousness. Farce on the outside, tragedy within: this book is full of horrid laughter.
But Mills is not a natural pasticheur, and unfortunately it’s in her opening story, set in Oxford in 1861, that her ventriloquism comes badly unstuck. A young woman “in possession of chestnut hair”? A vicar who “tugs at his ebullient mutton-chops, before resuming his impassioned tirade”? On page 49, the word “benignant”? This is less pastiche, more tin-eared tosh.
Against this serious failing, what defences can we muster? Quite a few. A pair of likeable protagonists who stand up surprisingly well to their repeated eviscerations. A plot that takes storytelling seriously, and would rather serve the reader’s appetites than sneer at them. Last but not least, some excellent incidental invention: to wit, a long-imprisoned writer’s idea of what the 1980s must look like (“They will drink too much ale and be in possession of magical machines”) and, elsewhere, a mother’s choice of bedtime reading material (“The Humanist Book of Classic Fairy Tales, retold by minor, marginalised characters”) .
But it’s as Kurt Vonnnegut said: “If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” To put it less kindly: nothing kills the novel faster than aspiration. The Watermark, that wanted to be a very big book about everything, becomes, in the end, something else: a long, involved, self-alienating exploration of itself.