Something in ‘The Watermark’

Sam Mills’ second metafictional novel The Watermark feels a lot like Misery meets Ghostwritten meets The Book Eaters.

It’s like Misery in that it turns the parasocial author-fan relationship into a real one of captivity; Ghostwritten in that it has consciousnesses–watermarks–hopping from one story to the next; and The Book Eaters for its foregrounding of material books in a contemporary Britain that Mills has grafted onto Victorian England.

Perhaps in the UK, books are more physically present while their authors and readers are more sinister. Perhaps there have been more recent North American SF novels than Stephen King’s 40-year-old tome that feature books as part of the metafictional landscape, but not two mainstream novels in three years.

Moreover, only in a British SF novel would the character of an elite writer use tea as his fiendish mechanism to capture people and bind them into his stories. And only in British SF would that betrayal—the poisoning of the tea—have such resonance.

Augustus Fate is the tea-wielding author hoping to use his captive muses to springboard from perennial shortlister to winner of prizes. A recluse who finds real people tedious and idiotic, he wants to exploit the conscious responses of others to add to his novels’ psychological realism. For her part, Mills throws out his pompous name with a knowing nod and several references to nominative determinism.

Fate holds Rachel Levy and Jaime Lancia captive in his secluded Welsh cottage for some months from the end of 2019. During that time Rachel and Jaime flit from story to story occupying related characters in a recent version of Manchester, in Victorian Oxford, in Czarist Russia and in a future London. The content and genre of each of these stories varies with the narrator. Sometimes it’s Fate, sometimes James Gwent – the pseudonym of another author, held captive by Fate who they meet in Fate’s novel – sometimes T. S. Maslennikov, sometimes others, including an unknown author who Rachel speculates (wink wink!) might be female.

This frequent foregrounding of the narration–sometimes it gets actually pronounced out loud to certain characters–gets irritating. Also irritating is that, unlike Ghostwritten, the stories are short and unfinished, jumbled in on one another and then abandoned like cars in an action movie. The stories are less like a series of novels and more like a fragmented set of lenses to view the love story between Rachel and Jaime who, prior to the events of The Watermark, have only met in an online suicide forum.

In the stories the couple grows old and grows young with each other, loving, leaving and cheating on one another. They have a child, Finn, who they would rather have called Lysander but the computers of that age overruled them. In another disappointment, he rather disappears at the end. Without spoiling the ending, the stacked narratives give way at the end to the barely believable world of the pandemic, leaving the remaining characters wondering who the narrator of this world can possibly be.

The length of The Watermark is both its drawback and its virtue. It perhaps would like to be a romp, as some UK reviews called it, but it is too lengthy and by no means gleeful enough to earn that epithet. Moreover, not only does it drag at points in the 500 pages, but the centrality of the suicide forum and the couples’ relationships to their mothers suggest that this is, at its heart, too psychologically involved to be a romp.

However, the novel’s sheer duration makes us identify with Rachel and Jaime as they drift in and out of remembering that they are just characters in a book. Of course, they also believe, though we do not, that they can escape from the pages of a book. And, as readers who believe that we can also escape from the pages of a book, that makes us wonder whether, perhaps, our own stories have trapped us? What genres are they? Who are the mysterious Storytellers who narrate them to us? Only Sam Mills seems to know for sure.

(Melville House, 2-11-25)