Reviewed by Harriet
Sam Mills is not a prolific writer, but her books are well worth waiting for. In 2012 she published The Quiddity of Will Self, which she described as ‘the literary equivalent of Being John Malkovich’. In that novel, characters became so obsessed with Will Self that they underwent plastic surgery to look more like him, and passages of the novel echo his challenging, experimental style. Self himself has written that ‘What excites me is to disturb the reader’s fundamental assumptions. I want to make them feel that certain categories within which they are used to perceiving the world are unstable’, and this could easily be applied to Mills’ own novels. The Watermark is the only work of fiction she has published since 2012, though her moving and thought-provoking memoir The Fragments of My Father [reviewed here] came out in 2020. Now we are back in a similarly metafictional world, in which the two young protagonists are flung through time, having been placed in drug-induced comas by the reclusive novelist Augustus Fate. Fate’s recent books have been criticised as lacking convincing characters, so his solution is to steal the spirits of Jaime and Rachel and insert them into the book, or books, he is currently writing. Mostly they are unaware that they are artificially created characters but from time to time something will remind them that they have other ‘real’ lives in another alternative universe.
The first book the couple find themselves in is a rather corny Victorian pastiche called Thomas Turridge, set in 1860s Oxford. Here Jaime, the narrator, is the eponymous Thomas, a young boy who falls for the neighbours’ attractive young governess Rachel. Initially completely lost in the narrative, Jaime begins to hear a rather disconcerting voice making comments on the action, such as ‘And so Thomas kissed Rachel and they burnt with a fiery, illicit passion’. Eventually a helicopter crashes into the church and the couple are able to escape, only to find themselves in Manchester in 2014. This time the narrator is Rachel, an art student, who is totally bemused when a young man approaches her: ‘Hey Rachel, it’s me, Jaime’. Though Jamie remembers their 1860 meeting, Rachel is oblivious at first, but soon the memories come back, much to her discomfort: ‘I’m not sure who the Rachel of this world is meant to be. I feel as though my body is a sketch and I need to block in the colours’. The couple’s third adventure finds them in 1928 Russia, complete with snow and wolves, and the fourth in 2047 London. They’re back in Oxford in 1910, and in the Epilogue – well, wait and see.
Sam Mills obviously had a lot of fun constructing these different worlds, each stylistically appropriate to its position in time as imagined by their controlling author. But the overall trajectory of the novel also follows the story of Jaime and Rachel through the ups and downs of their relationship, their ages more or less corresponding to whatever time period they find themselves in. So from 1860, when Jaime is a child and Rachel a very young woman, to 2047, they have reached old age. Theirs is a love story, but a very human one, with anger and sadness as well as happiness and pleasure. Though their ages change, their personalities do not – they carry their quirks and their issues with them throughout.
This brings me to what appears to be an important subtext of the novel. In her various lives, Rachel often refers to an ancient text of Hindu philosophy, Vasistha’s Yoga. She sometimes reads someone a story from it to illustrate a point she wants to make, and at a dark point in her life explains the fact that ‘the world is not as it should be’ by explaining that ‘The Vedas state that we are in the depths of Kali Yuga, that darkest hour when the positive laws of humanity lie dormant, where demons thrive and misery is the medium’. Many times in the novel she brings up the Vedic concept of samskaras, latent impressions which follow the soul from birth to birth:
Samskaras drift in our consciousness: the ache of a love affair cut short; the pang of an interview that never led to a job; the hollow left by a lost parent. With each rebirth, the kaleidoscope twists and casts a fresh pattern, shaping new desires, hungers that promise the illusion of happiness.
Samskaras might seem to be inescapable, but, say the Vedas, it is possible to escape them by reaching a state sometimes known as awakening, when the soul finally recognises its own true nature. Rachel alludes to this when, in a life-threatening situation she tells herself ‘This is not my body….In this world you are pure consciousness’.
Jaime does not buy this concept, one of the ways in which he and Rachel differ radically. Many readers probably won’t buy it either, but it seems that the novel could be read as an allegory of the couples’ souls passing through their many incarnations, each time being faced with their various samskaras, which give rise to the quirks and issues which often disrupt their relationship but also presumably to the enduring love between them. This would explain the novel’s title – watermarks can run throughout documents as a sort of persistent presence. Read like this, the moments in each story when the characters realise that they are not in the place where they belong could be seen as a glimpse of awakening, which sadly does not persist into their next incarnation. But of course if you prefer, you can just read the novel as a very clever and entertaining romp, which it definitely is.
Harriet is a co-founder and one of the editors of Shiny.
Sam Mills, The Watermark (Granta, 2024). 978-1783789658, 544pp., hardback.
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