THE CONFESSIONS OF FRANNIE LANGTON, by Sara Collins

When visiting my sister in London earlier this year, I picked up this book in Waterstones, attracted by its gothic cover aesthetic, intriguing title, and placement in a display of LGBT+ fiction. When the back cover revealed it to be a crime drama/ murder mystery of sorts, set in the early 19th century, I was sold.

• Genres: Fictional memoir, gothic, historical fiction, crime/mystery, drama, LGBT+

• Trigger/content warnings: Slavery; racism; slurs; violence with references to torture; physical, sexual, and emotional abuse; non-explicit sexual content; references to BDSM kink (not the focus of the story at all, but part of the goings-on in one or two chapters where Frannie is working as a prostitute/dominatrix); addiction; miscarriage; suicide

Frannie Langton is born into slavery on a Jamaican plantation, and well-educated by her far-from-benevolent slaver. Eventually she accompanies him to England, where she is technically "free" but nevertheless "given" as a servant to a man named George Benham, whose wife is eccentric, charming, playful, needy, incredibly lonely, and addicted to laudanum. Frannie becomes Madame Benham's lady's maid, and soon an intimate relationship forms between the two.

From the outset of the novel, we know Frannie to be on trial for the alleged murder of the Benhams, but we know very little of the details, and Frannie seems to know just as little. Almost immediately, we know Frannie is an unreliable narrator in some way -- whether she is purposefully lying, or whether she is in denial and repressing something, or whether she did honestly black out and has no idea what happened to the Benhams.

After the opening chapter which establishes the stakes, we go back to the very beginning, as Frannie tells her life story in the form of a written history for her lawyer (who has asked her, "Give me something to save your neck with!")

It's a slow start, possibly because knowing it's about a murder we're eager to get to the juicy murdery bits. But Frannie starts in her childhood and proceeds chronologically and ponderously -- and in the end, I believe, it makes sense why the book does this. As Frannie says later on, she could have just told you what she remembers of the night of the murder... but without knowing everything that brought her life to this point, would you truly have understood?

Even so, there are some pretty important events about which Frannie remains oblique until the very end, where her confessions in the courtroom are confusing, surprising, and chilling. And the surprises don't end when the trial does.

For all Frannie can be outspoken and opinionated, to me there was something very soft and considered about her narrative style, and a lot of the time she felt like a passive observer of her own life. That's not a bad thing, at least not in my opinion, as far as characterization goes. It makes sense when you think about how much freedom and agency is constantly denied her, in various contexts. Even when she's making a choice, is it a choice? Even during her brief period of work as a prostitute, where men pay her to dominate and inflict pain upon them -- she's "in charge" in those scenarios in only the most imaginary way, because she's doing this out of necessity. And she is quite literally an observer of her own trial, having to stand there and hear what everyone else have to say and opine about her and her motives. All the while, she writes this memoir as if trying to make sense of how she came to be here.

It's a slow, melancholy book, even the romantic bits, and even in the descriptions of high society players and parties. But it sneaks up on you, and when it finally does, it's compelling.