Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters

I tried this book somewhat tentatively, because I don't usually like novels that are overly explicit about sex, but I wound up really liking it. It's actually very well and engagingly written, and seemed to me a lot like an eighteenth century novel (maybe Tom Jones or something like that) because of its fantastically improbable, fast-moving and exciting narrative, with the main character's fortunes going up and down erratically (from music hall star to maniacally depressive recluse in a few hours, from petted sex toy to penniless wanderer in seconds). I got really attached to some of the characters, I loved, Nancy, the main character and really loved her landlady and her autistic daughter, who sort of adopted Nancy at one point, and later Diana, who 'keeps' Nancy. What I found really strange was that Sarah Waters is much better at writing characters in explicit situations, or who are very experienced, rather than naive or innocent characters. Nancy only comes into focus as a character once she enters a sexual relationship with her first partner, before that, I couldn't believe in her as a character or understand her behaviour at all. All the dialogue is really boring at first, sometimes it just says something like 'we talked about x for a while' and whatever it is seems really dull and stupid, it's as if Sarah Waters didn't even know what to fill up the space with. All the characters come alive only when it comes to sex, which I'm not sure I liked. But I really loved the pace and action of the novel, even though I absolutely hated the way it ended (I really didn't want to read about how socialism is the answer to all of life's problems, apparently even those of sexuality). I guess that from a novel that takes up such a controversial, or at least daring and unusual, subject, I would have expected a daring and unusual form. But it's sort of like a Dickens novel, except with lesbians and explicit sex. I really enjoyed the language though, there's something both very nineteenth-century and contemporary about it, I'm not sure what it is, but Sarah Waters really got the right note in terms of the language and atmosphere for a historical novel. Another strange thing about it is the constant explicit foreshadowing, things like 'but I little knew how tragically it would end', which made me so anxious while I was reading it, because I kept worrying about what dreadful thing was going to happen. I'm sure it was deliberate, but it felt a bit overused. It's really readable and entertaining, but I really would have preferred for it to be less explicit at some parts, there were things in there that I just would have preferred to never have read and that slightly haunt me at night.