The structure of this novel recalls the infamous words of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the height of his attempt to cover up the White House’s Iraqi WMD debacle: “There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.” Rumsfeld’s mangling of the English language notwithstanding, he wasn’t wrong. There are things we know. There are also things we don’t know. And stuck somewhere in the murky borderlands between the two are those things that we don’t know we don’t know until they become known. Twisted as this may be semantically, it is perfectly applied to the structure of Fingersmith.
The novel is an exercise in the value of point of view to tell a story. An omniscient all-knowing narrator could have told this story, but it would feel like a monumental cheat. The storyline is built upon lies and deception and the narrative is built upon the relating of lies and deception as if they were truth. Because, to two narrators telling the story, they are truth. This is proof enough of the power of those unknown unknowns. Susan and Maud share narrative duties and in each of their sections, the reader is led to believe certain things that turn out to be less than true. This is not a case of the narrator misleading the reader; the narrators may mislead other characters and certainly they are misled by others, but in telling their stories they can only rely upon what they know. If they don’t that what they know isn’t really what they know, they can hardly be blamed for acting upon bad faith accepted as good faith.
Into this chasm arrives irony. The entire book can be accurately said to be a demonstration of irony piled atop irony. The ironies of the story beget other ironies in the telling of the story. This structure can only continue to support floor after floor if the narrative foundation is strong enough. A third-person omniscient narrator would not be strong enough and the entire thing would collapse around the reader’s rejection of purpose being withheld from knowing information that the narrator knows. A limited third-person narration in which only that which is observable would be related to the reader would also be too soft for support because it is absolutely essential for the reader to penetrate into the thoughts of certain characters at certain times. One could combine the two perspectives—not allowing insight into most characters, but allowing limited insight into Susan and Maud—but again the problem becomes how to artfully manage keeping important information from the reader that the character knows.
The problem is easily described. The reader has to know what they know and not know what they don’t know. But what they can’t be allowed access to is the fact that there things they don’t know that they don’t know. In order for the reader to become fully invested emotionally in Susan’s story conveyed in Part I, it is perfectly acceptable to know that she is in on a sting to rob a young woman of her inheritance. On the other hand, the twist at the end of Part I which sets up the switch in narrator in Part II cannot yet become known to the reader while remaining unknown to Susan. Well, of course, it could be written in a way that the revelation which comes at the end was made known earlier, but in so doing, the emotional investment is undercut. Because one has to become invested not just in Susan, but in Maud. It is because this is not just to be Susan’s story that one must become invested in both characters and that investment, of course, forms the basis for the novel’s categorization as lesbian fiction.
The way a story is told is fundamental to the story that is being told. A writer can become so frustrated while trying to write what is a perfectly constructed plot because that plot is being told from the wrong perspective. Some may give up, depriving the world of literary greatness. Most will work on it until they figure out the proper narrative perspective. Perspective is even more important in a story like that told in Fingersmith because it is a story that absolutely lives or dies on its revelations of not just what isn’t known, but what isn’t known to be unknown.
Perhaps, in the hands of some majestically talented writer who is typing with the hand of God guiding the fingersmith over the keyboard, the love story of Susan and Maud could be told just as successfully using a different approach to point of view. For the moment, however, that alternative must remain an unknown known possessed only by that hypothetical author and God.
