Sam Mills’s virtuoso new novel is – strictly speaking – fun. By that I mean it’s an adventure story that doesn’t need to be taken too seriously. The Count of Monte Cristo is the ultimate fun: a tale of repeated imprisonment and escape, of thwarted love affairs, of daring disguises and, in the end, of triumphant human determination and ingenuity. The Watermark has all that, but with added metatextuality and time travel. If you love Doctor Who, you’ll love this book. It whisks you along on an equally breathless Technicolor plunge through different eras and genres. But where the Doctor has the Tardis, The Watermark’s two main characters – journalist Jaime and painter Rachel – have cups of magical tea.
The tea is administered to them by an obviously savage villain, Augustus Fate. Fate is a bestselling author but extremely bitter and lives in rural Wales. After seven Booker Prize nominations, he has realised that his novels lack compelling characters and real emotion. His solution is to lure two real people to his remote house and then use the magic tea to sedate, brainwash and infiltrate them into his faltering work, Thomas Turridge. This is a poor Victorian imitation set in 1860s Oxford. Jaime becomes the titular Thomas; Rachel keeps her real name. Neither will remember who they are or what happened to them before. Instead, Fate can put them through horrific ordeals, recording what they say and do as they react. An award-winning literary masterpiece is almost inevitable if he can only keep the police at bay and keep his two bedridden prisoners unconscious.
However, because it’s a fun adventure, Jaime and Rachel are able to gradually wake up in Fate’s world. They hear the narrator say things like, “And so Thomas kissed Rachel and they burned in fiery, forbidden passion.” This is where the novel is really clever – because it forces us to read extremely carefully. Every anachronism, anything that fits our world but not the Victorian era, is a sign that Jaime’s true self is struggling to break through. Finally, with the crashing arrival of a helicopter in the middle of a church service, we get the full world-splitting effect. Fate is thwarted, at least temporarily, and Jaime and Rachel are able to escape into another book – this time set in a poorly conceived 2010s Manchester. Poorly conceived, because its author is their friend and advisor from the first story, Mr. James Gwent, apparently a man from the 1860s but actually a previous kidnapping victim of Fate’s.
This section is one of the novel’s many high points. Mills pokes a lot of fun at the limits of Gwent’s imagination. When Jaime and Rachel take a trip to St. Petersburg, their flight becomes increasingly vague. “I point to the window. The landscape outside is colorless. Our seats are no more than pencil marks; the view from the window is reduced to a draft.” Three more jumps follow, with the lovers surfing through books, to the Soviet Carpathians of 1928, to a robot-ruled London of 2047, and to another destination—I won’t give anything away by mentioning the finale.
Throughout her work, Mills brings to bear the skills she acquired in her previous genre-bending and dizzying novels, particularly The Quiddity of Will Self and her more recent memoir about caring for a parent suffering from schizophrenia, The Fragments of My Father. Metafiction, which The Watermark undoubtedly falls into, is often seen as heartless literary play. But Mills’s writing style is anything but cold. The very thing that August Fate lacks and what she must steal from others, she gives with great generosity. The leitmotif that runs throughout the novel is the problematic love between Jaime and Rachel. Whatever reality they live in, he will always appear with a bird and she will always reluctantly but passionately fall for his foolishness. They will argue. They will break up. They will disagree about the basics of life: Jaime will be optimistic and rational; Rachel will be nearly suicidal and yet believe in higher powers. But they will always find their way back together, fighting their way out of each new prison of ponderous world-building and restoring their true, flawed relationship.
Various phrases echo through their story, reminding the lovers of the reality in which they began. The phrase that recurs most forcefully is, like Alice in Wonderland: “You are nothing but a pack of cards!”, the call to disillusionment, the call to life.This is not real. This is a backstory wrapped around my soul. You’re in a book, you’re in a book.“But what a book.
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