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The Watermark
Rachel and their story isn't simple. It might not even be their story.Augustus Fate, a once-lauded novelist and now renowned recluse, is struggling with his latest creation. But when Jaime and Rachel stumble into his remote cottage, he spies opportunity, imprisoning them inside his novel-in-progress. Now, the fledgling couple must try to find their way back home through a labyrinthine network of novels. 'And as they move from Victorian Oxford to a utopian Manchester, a harsh Russian winter to an AI-dominated near-future, so too does the narrative of their relationship change time and again. Together, they must figure out if this relationship of so many presents can have any future at all.The Watermark is a heart-stopping exploration of the narratives we cling to in the course of a life, and the tendency of the world to unravel them. Kaleidoscopic and wildly imaginative, it how can we truly be ourselves, when Fate is pulling the strings?
544 pages, Hardcover
Published August 1, 2024
About the author
Sam Mills
23 books14 followersSamantha Mills
Sam Mills was born in 1975. After graduating from Lincoln College, Oxford University, she worked briefly as a chess journalist and publicist before becoming a full-time writer. She has contributed short stories to literary magazines such as Tomazi and 3am and written articles for the Guardian, The Weeklings and The Independent.
She is the author of 3 young adult novels, published by Faber, including The Boys Who Saved the World, which is currently being adapted for film and the award-winning Blackout. Her debut novel for adults, The Quiddity of Will Self (Corsair) was described by The Sunday Times as “an ingenious, energetic read” and the Guardian as “an extraordinary novel of orgiastic obsession.” Sam is one of the founding members of the Will Self Club.
Sam Mills was born in 1975. After graduating from Lincoln College, Oxford University, she worked briefly as a chess journalist and publicist before becoming a full-time writer. She has contributed short stories to literary magazines such as Tomazi and 3am and written articles for the Guardian, The Weeklings and The Independent.
She is the author of 3 young adult novels, published by Faber, including The Boys Who Saved the World, which is currently being adapted for film and the award-winning Blackout. Her debut novel for adults, The Quiddity of Will Self (Corsair) was described by The Sunday Times as “an ingenious, energetic read” and the Guardian as “an extraordinary novel of orgiastic obsession.” Sam is one of the founding members of the Will Self Club.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 6, 2024
Sam Mills is known for her fiction and as co-founder of indie press Dodo Ink. Here she builds on theorists like Baudrillard, from his work on reality versus representation of reality to his later aphoristic Cool Memories, to construct a series of intricate, interlinking stories centred on aspiring couple Jaime and Rachel. After Jaime travels to interview faded, Booker author Augustus Fate, he finds himself trapped in Fate’s latest novel, a Victorian pastiche in which Jaime plays the title role, and Rachel surfaces as a local governess with whom he becomes infatuated. It soon transpires that Jaime and Rachel have been drugged and somehow inserted into Fate’s work.
Mills’s story follows Jaime and Rachel’s attempts to escape from fiction to reality, journeying through multiple storylines in search of freedom: moving to a realist plot set in near-contemporary Manchester to the Carpathians in the 1920s to London in the distant future. Mills interweaves elements taken from the work of authors from Henry James to Dickens, Camus, Aldous Huxley, and Asimov in his robot phase. All of which combine to form a commentary on the nature of narrative itself; its relationship to the grand narratives of the eras in which it was produced from God to Darwin to Marxism to capitalism; the role that narrative plays in the ways that readers interpret their experiences; and the interaction between narrative and individuals reflecting on their own identities and ability to shape their life stories. Building, in part, on Baudrillard’s theories on the ways in which people might seek to escape into the technologies they created.
Certain characters, events and themes recur in each of the storylines Jaime and Rachel enter - albeit slightly reconfigured, sometimes slightly skewed. Rachel retains her original position as an artist, musing on the nature of art – panacea or iconoclastic - and the social constraints placed on women artists. Both Jaime and Rachel are bound up in thoughts about fate versus self-determination, what makes life real, how much of their understanding of their worlds is shaped by their societies and the culture of their time.
It's a lengthy, sprawling novel, ambitious and inventive, I found elements gripping and entertaining, others a little overegged, repetitive. It’s the kind of book likely to appeal to fans of writers like Scarlett Thomas, Haruki Murakami or David Mitchell or of films like The Matrix and Synecdoche, New York. Unfortunately, although these are authors and pieces I can admire to a certain extent, they don’t massively appeal to me. I had a similar response to Mills’s novel, I admired numerous aspects, I enjoyed others particularly the sections set in the future. But overall, I was never fully engaged with this or totally invested in the concepts it sets out to examine.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Granta for an ARC
Mills’s story follows Jaime and Rachel’s attempts to escape from fiction to reality, journeying through multiple storylines in search of freedom: moving to a realist plot set in near-contemporary Manchester to the Carpathians in the 1920s to London in the distant future. Mills interweaves elements taken from the work of authors from Henry James to Dickens, Camus, Aldous Huxley, and Asimov in his robot phase. All of which combine to form a commentary on the nature of narrative itself; its relationship to the grand narratives of the eras in which it was produced from God to Darwin to Marxism to capitalism; the role that narrative plays in the ways that readers interpret their experiences; and the interaction between narrative and individuals reflecting on their own identities and ability to shape their life stories. Building, in part, on Baudrillard’s theories on the ways in which people might seek to escape into the technologies they created.
Certain characters, events and themes recur in each of the storylines Jaime and Rachel enter - albeit slightly reconfigured, sometimes slightly skewed. Rachel retains her original position as an artist, musing on the nature of art – panacea or iconoclastic - and the social constraints placed on women artists. Both Jaime and Rachel are bound up in thoughts about fate versus self-determination, what makes life real, how much of their understanding of their worlds is shaped by their societies and the culture of their time.
It's a lengthy, sprawling novel, ambitious and inventive, I found elements gripping and entertaining, others a little overegged, repetitive. It’s the kind of book likely to appeal to fans of writers like Scarlett Thomas, Haruki Murakami or David Mitchell or of films like The Matrix and Synecdoche, New York. Unfortunately, although these are authors and pieces I can admire to a certain extent, they don’t massively appeal to me. I had a similar response to Mills’s novel, I admired numerous aspects, I enjoyed others particularly the sections set in the future. But overall, I was never fully engaged with this or totally invested in the concepts it sets out to examine.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Granta for an ARC
July 8, 2024
I really don’t know what genre you would call this, but it’s a great mindbender! There is a love story at the heart of it all. This was absolutely original and I was thoroughly entertained. Many thanks to NetGalley for an arc of this book
August 4, 2024
The Watermark is an ambitious blend of high-concept romance and lit fic pastiche. A famously reclusive author grants an interview to a competition winner, Jaime, a recent PhD graduate who hopes to spin a career out of said interview. Take a trip to an isolated cottage, much weirdness ensues, and after a cup of drugged tea Jaime wakes up inside the author's new novel. The author is called Augustus Fate, so quite how serious Sam Mills is being with their metafictional workout is unclear. Fate has had writer's block and recent criticism that his characterisation hasn't come off as real. Hence he has trapped people to play roles in his book to flesh them out a bit. The mechanism to how this happens is unclear, initially Jaime, and a woman he had been interacting with on suicide noticeboards Rachel, are subsumed by the written roles they are put in. But slowly their awareness unfolds and they start acting anachronistically for the pastiche Dickens book they find themselves in. Unable to go up, they go out, into a modern state of the nation style romance (a segment where they at least explore some of the workings of the concept, then a mid-twentieth century Russian novel, and some rather unconvincing sci-fi too.
The problem with this kind of meta-fictional concept is to what degree the pastiches work, and are compelling in their own right? Unfortunately for me, the only one that really worked was the Russian one, which is also the one where our lead characters are most subsumed in the narrative they find themselves in. But then I never really found Jaime or Rachel all that compelling to start off with, and combined with their low-level depressive beginnings (she is a visual artist who has given up), the impetus for them to escape beyond that being the plot of a book like this never convinced. Indeed when they find themselves in the contemporary novel, they are tempted to stay there, if just to avoid COVID and be safe. In some ways, it felt like the scrapings of some short stories bent into shape around the meta-fictional narrative, and the execution - and the characters - needed to be a lot better to make me like it. I finished to find out how it would end, but I had stopped caring quite some time before.
The problem with this kind of meta-fictional concept is to what degree the pastiches work, and are compelling in their own right? Unfortunately for me, the only one that really worked was the Russian one, which is also the one where our lead characters are most subsumed in the narrative they find themselves in. But then I never really found Jaime or Rachel all that compelling to start off with, and combined with their low-level depressive beginnings (she is a visual artist who has given up), the impetus for them to escape beyond that being the plot of a book like this never convinced. Indeed when they find themselves in the contemporary novel, they are tempted to stay there, if just to avoid COVID and be safe. In some ways, it felt like the scrapings of some short stories bent into shape around the meta-fictional narrative, and the execution - and the characters - needed to be a lot better to make me like it. I finished to find out how it would end, but I had stopped caring quite some time before.
August 14, 2024
The Watermark has a really intriguing premise - what would happen if real people were transported into a fictional world? I liked the idea of drinking different special teas to be transported in and out of a book, causing the person to forget their real life and live authentically within the narrative.
However, I didn’t really understand the love story between the main characters Jaime and Rachel. They were in love just because. And Augustus Fate was evil just because. And it’s a long book when you’re not really invested in the characters.
However, I didn’t really understand the love story between the main characters Jaime and Rachel. They were in love just because. And Augustus Fate was evil just because. And it’s a long book when you’re not really invested in the characters.
September 6, 2024
Nice idea, but it over-reached itself, was too long, and largely incoherent. And I felt nothing for the characters.
September 24, 2024
I really liked the idea behind The Watermark: 2 humans fuelling a narrative, doing the bidding of the narrator/storyteller. At first, the jumping from narrative to narrative was fun, the common elements connective the stories and characters were fascinating to discover, but by the time we were jumping into the 3rd narrative while only hitting the 40% mark, I started to become quite worried. And indeed, I had solid reasons to be worried: as the same pattern repeats itself another few times, with the last 20% being absolutely excruciating to go through! I felt that very little has been added to the core story with each narrative, character development has been minimal too, therefore repetition at nauseam of the same few plot lines won;t make for a great read! Yes some interesting ideas have been thrown in, ranging from art to politics, but again, one does not have to bare a million pages just for that! And to top it all up, the end left me in a rage!! After not giving up on this narrative, when I should have, to be served with that ridiculous ending..nah that was just too much to bare!!
*Novel from NetGalley with many thanks to the publisher for the opportunity to read this!
*Novel from NetGalley with many thanks to the publisher for the opportunity to read this!
July 24, 2024
Thank you to the publishers for the ARC!
I'm finding this review tricky to write, as there were things about The Watermark which I loved, but I also feel it's deeply flawed. There are the bones of something wonderful, but the narrative doesn't flesh them out.
Jaime thinks he's going to conduct an interview with the famous writer, Augustus Fate, and that will be that. Unfortunately, that isn't that. Fate, who is struggling to give his characters personalities that come alive, drugs him and holds him hostage in his latest novel. There, Jaime discovers Rachel, the woman he's never met, but with whom he's fallen in love. They are both Fate's captives. The novel tells the story of their fictional explorations, their developing romance, and their attempts to escape. This involves travelling through four different books, each set in a different time period and location.
I LOVED the concept of this book, which is why I requested it and was grateful to be chosen for an ARC. Unfortunately, I struggled through most of it and came very close to quitting half-way through. Sam Mills' prose is strong and poetic, something distractingly so, but the writing was polished enough to pull me in. There are many beautiful lines expressing wonderful thoughts, which I highlighted to re-vist. I didn't find her storytelling equally compelling, due to the long stretches in which Jaime and Rachel simply wander around, thinking deeply about their relationship and situation. The Russian section, in particular, is torturously slow and repetitive. (FYI to the publisher, it's also full of glitches, sections missing, and the illustrations didn't show up on my Kindle. I just had blank pages.)
I'm taking a wild guess in suspecting that the author is a big fan of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (one my personal favourite novels) as The Watermark echoes it to an extent. In Cloud Atlas, however, each story written in a different genre felt very much like a it was written in a different genre. The writing style didn't really change between sections in the Watermark, however. The 2047 section didn't feel futuristic, the prose style wasn't that different from the style in the Manchester section. It all felt like it was written by the same author, which wasn't the case within the world-building.
I did very much enjoy the 2047 section, though. The characters came to life and the story progressed forward and kept me involved. I liked how the characters aged a bit through each section, as if passing through their lives. I suspect the book mused on many interesting ideas about fiction, immersion, choice, etc, but the story didn't keep me involved. I'll definitely keep thinking about this book, I just really wish the story-telling has been tighter and stronger. The world-building was also very vague and muddled, which wouldn't have bothered me so much if the story had held me hostage.
I enjoyed the ending, which I won't spoil.
I'm finding this review tricky to write, as there were things about The Watermark which I loved, but I also feel it's deeply flawed. There are the bones of something wonderful, but the narrative doesn't flesh them out.
Jaime thinks he's going to conduct an interview with the famous writer, Augustus Fate, and that will be that. Unfortunately, that isn't that. Fate, who is struggling to give his characters personalities that come alive, drugs him and holds him hostage in his latest novel. There, Jaime discovers Rachel, the woman he's never met, but with whom he's fallen in love. They are both Fate's captives. The novel tells the story of their fictional explorations, their developing romance, and their attempts to escape. This involves travelling through four different books, each set in a different time period and location.
I LOVED the concept of this book, which is why I requested it and was grateful to be chosen for an ARC. Unfortunately, I struggled through most of it and came very close to quitting half-way through. Sam Mills' prose is strong and poetic, something distractingly so, but the writing was polished enough to pull me in. There are many beautiful lines expressing wonderful thoughts, which I highlighted to re-vist. I didn't find her storytelling equally compelling, due to the long stretches in which Jaime and Rachel simply wander around, thinking deeply about their relationship and situation. The Russian section, in particular, is torturously slow and repetitive. (FYI to the publisher, it's also full of glitches, sections missing, and the illustrations didn't show up on my Kindle. I just had blank pages.)
I'm taking a wild guess in suspecting that the author is a big fan of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (one my personal favourite novels) as The Watermark echoes it to an extent. In Cloud Atlas, however, each story written in a different genre felt very much like a it was written in a different genre. The writing style didn't really change between sections in the Watermark, however. The 2047 section didn't feel futuristic, the prose style wasn't that different from the style in the Manchester section. It all felt like it was written by the same author, which wasn't the case within the world-building.
I did very much enjoy the 2047 section, though. The characters came to life and the story progressed forward and kept me involved. I liked how the characters aged a bit through each section, as if passing through their lives. I suspect the book mused on many interesting ideas about fiction, immersion, choice, etc, but the story didn't keep me involved. I'll definitely keep thinking about this book, I just really wish the story-telling has been tighter and stronger. The world-building was also very vague and muddled, which wouldn't have bothered me so much if the story had held me hostage.
I enjoyed the ending, which I won't spoil.
August 4, 2024
Ambitious but flawed near-fantasy novel
This year alone, I've read about a dozen books with meta- or semi-metatextual structures, some more successful than others.
This is not one of those.
Essentially, *spoiler* two relatively ordinary protagonists are trapped in literature by a mastermind, and the book then chronicles their escape from their enemy's clutches. In the world of the book, the mastermind is a Booker Prize nominated author, which is where the book starts to fall apart: the first book, the author's current project, in which the heroes get trapped is a turgid, sub-Dickens or sub-Gaskell, mid-Victorian pastiche, which is isn't supposed to be a badly written book as the author's publishers are relatively happy with it, apart from the appearance of a helicopter crashing into the local church—I can't even. But it is badly written, as is the opening frame, as are the interim sections with the author in the real world (of the book), as are the following novels into which the heroes escape on their way back to reality.
The machine of Mills's fantasy is not explained, explored or even discussed; it just is and it works in the real world and in the book worlds in exactly the same way. It's like The Matrix set in a slush pile.
This year alone, I've read about a dozen books with meta- or semi-metatextual structures, some more successful than others.
This is not one of those.
Essentially, *spoiler* two relatively ordinary protagonists are trapped in literature by a mastermind, and the book then chronicles their escape from their enemy's clutches. In the world of the book, the mastermind is a Booker Prize nominated author, which is where the book starts to fall apart: the first book, the author's current project, in which the heroes get trapped is a turgid, sub-Dickens or sub-Gaskell, mid-Victorian pastiche, which is isn't supposed to be a badly written book as the author's publishers are relatively happy with it, apart from the appearance of a helicopter crashing into the local church—I can't even. But it is badly written, as is the opening frame, as are the interim sections with the author in the real world (of the book), as are the following novels into which the heroes escape on their way back to reality.
The machine of Mills's fantasy is not explained, explored or even discussed; it just is and it works in the real world and in the book worlds in exactly the same way. It's like The Matrix set in a slush pile.
September 28, 2024
DNF.
A 13 year old boy in love and kissing a 23 year old woman wouldn't be published if the writer was male. Of course it's a fantasy ...
But it's uncomfortable and I quickly lost interest in reading further.
A 13 year old boy in love and kissing a 23 year old woman wouldn't be published if the writer was male. Of course it's a fantasy ...
But it's uncomfortable and I quickly lost interest in reading further.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews