Book Review: The Little Stranger

Reviewed By: Lynn Harnett

The Little Stranger     Amazon US HC Amazon Canada HC
Sarah Waters
Class/Genre:   Mystery   Historical   Supernatural   Gothic
Riverhead, April 30, 2009
Mystery, British gothic

“I first saw Hundreds Hall when I was ten years old.”

Ah, a perfect opening line for the classic English Victorian ghost story, never mind that it takes place in the tumult of the 20th century.

The narrator, Dr. Faraday, visits again 30 years later, just after World War II, called to attend a servant with a bellyache. He soon diagnoses the girl as a malingerer, hoping to be sent back to her miserable home rather than stay in a house that terrifies her with its size, its oppressive silence, and its dark and creepy corners.

Dr. Faraday, who comes from similar stock – his mother once a maid at Hundreds – scolds her but feels a cold impatience for the family’s lack of empathy toward the girl who is only 14 and the vast home’s sole live-in servant. Nevertheless, he agrees to stay for tea, “mainly, I must admit, because I realised that in staying to tea I’d be able to see more of the house….”

This conflicted tension is a constant undercurrent in Faraday’s psyche. He’s in awe of the house and very conscious of his roots. His parents died young, having worked themselves to death to provide a better life for their gifted son, and he deeply regrets the embarrassment he felt over their lower-class manners. Yet, while he has left his origins far behind, he will never be taken for a real member of the upper classes.

But the luxurious estate of his boyhood memory is crumbling, and as the manor’s son and daughter lead him up from the servant’s quarters, his anticipation of “the bare gloss service walls giving way to silk and stucco,” gives way to dismay and shock.

“I turned to Caroline and Roderick, expecting embarrassment, or even some sort of apology; but they led me past the damage as if quite unbothered by it.” Much of the furniture and paintings have been sold off, sections of the house are shut up, and the whole place is in a state of disrepair and dilapidation that seems beyond hope.

Still, the family persists. Presided over by their mother, the elegant Mrs. Ayres, they confine themselves to “the little parlor” (20 ft. by 30 ft.), its floorboards “humped and creaking” its furniture sagging and worn, and a Victorian chamber pot filled with water for their old dog. “And yet, somehow, the essential loveliness of the room stood out, like the handsome bones behind a ravaged face.”

Like the house, the family too is slipping. Roderick is a handsome young man of 24, but he limps from an insufficiently treated war wound and is subject to nerves – from the war perhaps or his burden of responsibility for the house. Caroline, too, is not quite the thing. In her late 20s, she is robust, sensible, even cheerful, but ungainly, thick-legged and homely; a spinster.

Still, Faraday finds himself befriending her as the family fortunes continue to limp downhill. Strange occurrences accelerate the trend and chinks mar the family front as accident and disaster undermine each one, mentally and physically.

Is there a supernatural malevolence in the house, as the servants believe? Or a morbid taint of hysteria or insanity in the blood? Or a malicious human enemy? Faraday keeps close, vigorously rejecting anything smacking of superstition, circling the family members like a working sheep dog, guided by his concern for the manor’s well being.

As the story proceeds the pace does not so much accelerate as intensify. Shadowy corners grow darker, gloom spirals to despair, envy becomes avarice, fixation heightens to obsession. Family members begin to lose their poise, self-possession – class. Faraday begins to lose his self-control, which could be even more socially disastrous.

Waters skillfully evokes the gothic ghost story in all its atmospheric glory while exploring the post-War crumbling of class structures as top-heavy behemoths were encroached upon by spanking new housing estates for the newly entitled hoi-polloi.

Her delicacy with ambiguity and doubt is virtuosic, but some readers may grow impatient. At 463 pages it’s a little slow. Waters is a little too enamored of her own lovely gothic prose, indulging in two or three or four descriptions when one would do.

But good gothic is a rarity these days and those who like their ghost stories psychological, ambiguous and atmospheric will not mind a few extra paragraphs here and there.

Lynn Harnett

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Lynn Harnett

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