The Little Stranger

Blurbed by the likes of Stephen King for its exceptional creepiness, \”The Little Stranger\” will disappoint those who are looking for a page turner in the mold of the American master of Gothic horror. Yes, the novel has all the trappings of a standard haunted house thriller: a once-grand, remotely situated mansion; owners reduced to shabby gentility; things that inexplicably go bump in the night; violent disfigurements and mysterious deaths. But all this is only scaffolding for a meticulously thoughtful examination of a society emerging from a devastating war into economic and social upheaval – Britain in 1947. Add the indelible poison of the English class system and an apparently trustworthy narrator who turns out to be anything but, and you have a richly satisfying novel of substantial depth and genuine, open-ended mystery. I\’ve not read Sarah Waters\’ other books, but on the evidence of this one she\’s an uncommonly gifted storyteller who\’s not afraid to take her time or to challenge the reader to figure out what she\’s really up to. \”The Little Stranger\” is too smart to be merely \”chilling.\” It doesn\’t leave you with the satisfaction of \”understanding,\” of seeing all the loose ends tidied up. If it has a fault, it\’s the fault of mercilessness. It\’s a haunted house story in the best sense – one that doesn\’t just rattle a crumbling mansion, but one you won\’t get out of your mind.

Warning spoilers I didn\’t hate this book, but honestly, I would not recommend it either. It is definitely a slow-burn, atmospheric tale, and I found it to be well written – far more so than many other popular novelists, but the ending is just so anti-climactic. From the beginning, I was very interested – in both the \”spooky\” elements, as well as the historical setting; I really enjoyed the historical elements that serve as the backdrop of the novel, and I learned a lot about England in the post WWII era. Still, although I found myself loath to \”put it down,\” this sentiment was due more from a desire to actually see something happen, rather than the suspense that something would happen. This book contains far or the mundane than it does of supernatural events. Then, by the time we get to the matriarch\’s death, all I really wanted to know was the identity of the ghost/spirit/poltergeist. Imagine my disappointment, then, when I got to chapter 15 and no explanation appeared. In the beginning, I felt certain that the \”ghost\” was the spirit of the deceased daughter, but as things progressed, this theory was dispelled, and I became convinced that the rather vengeful spirit wreaking havoc on the home was the projected negative energy of the narrator. One of the reviews I read praised the good doctor, and he is a swell guy – a regular Marcus Welby; however, I found many aspects of his personality concerning. This started with the \”parking\” scene when Caroline had to fight off his attentions. I was seriously concerned for a moment that he might rape her! Then, once he decides that he is interested in her romantically, he becomes quite controlling. Caroline recognizes this by the end of the novel and calls him on it. Consequently, at the end of the book when he drives back to the pond (the locale of the earlier \”parking\” scene) and has a strange dream about going back to Hundreds, I assumed that it was he who pushed Caroline off the landing. I became even more convinced of this when we learn that Caroline\’s last word was \”you!\” Caroline would certainly not refer to the ghost of her sister in this way; she never knew her sister. It\’s possible that the negative \”energy\” might have borne the face of her brother, but whom else would she have recognized but the doctor? Prior to this revelation, I had considered that it might be Betty\’s negative energy that was causing all the supernatural occurrences, but the doctor\’s s strange dream – combined with his state of mind, his actions after the breakup, and the timing of Caroline\’s death – led me to believe that, at the very least, he was responsible for her death, if not the other events. And yet, the end of the book addresses neither of those possibilities! Indeed, neither theory is even overtly hinted at! All in all, I just found the entire thing disappointing. Prior to completing the novel, I was really looking forward to the film, but now I\’m not even sure it will be worth watching…

I loved this novel––first one I\’ve read by Sarah Waters, and I plan to read everything else she\’s written. Though reviewers suggest that The Little Stranger is atypical, I trust that I\’ll love her other work as well. She\’s a gifted novelist, and I look forward to being taken on whatever imaginative, historical, sexual, psychological, or sociological trips she cares to explore. This novel, for me, never drags (as some reviewers complained–what was their problem?). The world it creates is solid, built of revelatory, convincing detail. Its conflicts unfold with subtle horror––and just as I thought there was no more to reveal, the book ended with yet another \”turn of the screw\” that made me want to go back and reread the beginning. I began seeing the fine thread that had been been there throughout, clear all the way to the last few ghastly sentences! The following may need a spoiler alert, so beware: One of the things Waters does so brilliantly in The Little Stranger is to let the reader\’s suspicions of the narrator\’s unreliability grow so gradually. His steadfast rationalism, even after a colleague offers a plausible way to read the presence of a ghost that differs from the narrator\’s pathologizing of any who disagree with him, begins to coincide with our creeping sense that he\’s so desperate to claim the family and house and to assert his control that he can\’t see or hear the truths spoken to him by the woman he wants to possess. I couldn\’t tear myself away from this book––intelligent, pleasurable, and compelling!

Well written novel about a working man stiff who is a doctor to the local countryside and gentry. Through a home visit he becomes involved with the Ayer\’s Family the local scions who have fallen on hard times. Analysts and readers will debate whether this is a Ghost, Poltergeist or Psychological novel. The atmosphere is adequately Gothic and yet despite the fine writing the story spirals to shoulder shrugging conclusion. In the end heartbreak and death seem the destiny of all involved. Ms. Waters offers a keen observation on England\’s Working Class and declining Gentry in post World War II. Reviewers will want to know – did I enjoy the book? And my answer is yes but I found it to be frustrating read as I wanted to slap silly all the main characters for their obtuseness. Worth a read, hard to put down but don\’t expect to be satisfied in the end. Not your typical ghost story – so leave your paranormal baggage at home

Don’t get me wrong, Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger is enjoyable and compelling, so stick with me for a few seconds and I’ll explain. Faraday, a GP with – in his own words – the appearance of a ‘balding shopkeeper’ is called out to Hundreds, the sizable home of the Ayres family in Warwickshire countryside, to attend to young maid Betty who appears to have a stomach complaint. It’s 1947 but Faraday has been to the house years before, when his mother was in service there. ‘I knew the place, I had been here before,’ strangely reminiscent of the character Charles Ryder in his opening to Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, and a likely indication of what the reader can expect; a decaying aristocracy, repressions, addictions, the emergence of new social order, and an unhappy? love affair. Sure enough, Faraday encounters son Rodrick, war-damaged and edgy, meets his sister – cardigan-wearing Caroline, heavy of face, straight of leg, and he converses with their mother Mrs Ayres who seems like a slightly better-presented version of Miss Havisham. Ma Ayres is an emotional cold fish whose displacement activities consist of gazing at old family photographs and recalling her late husband ‘the Colonel.’ She wastes no time in putting Pip – sorry Dr. Faraday – in his place by presenting him with a photograph of the Hundreds’ staff taken in the 1890s(?) which according to her shows Faraday’s mother. The metaphor of cold fish is aptly and masterly developed three quarters way through the narrative in a scene in Hundreds’ walled garden during which Faraday presses his hands against the ice of an ornamental pond to let air to the imprisoned carp swimming below. Faraday’s visits to the Ayres family increase in frequency as the narrative progresses, in fact so much of his time he\’s spending there that the reader is baffled by how he has time for other patients, puzzled as to how he can hold his practice together or his relationship with professional partner Dr Graham. To my mind this highlights the first of two main flaws in this novel. Faraday is the main protagonist, moreover he’s the sole narrator, but it’s Hundreds which is the seat of the action. He can\’t be in two places at once, so a large proportion of the narrative – including some of the most dramatic scenes – is delivered to the reader second hand – \’Caroline told me later\’, or \’Mrs Ayres told me later,\’ which gives it an air of artificiality and pushes the reader away. Perhaps that was Waters’ intention, and it’s only my view, someone else may see it differently. The second problem is that of sowing the seed of an idea and then reinforcing that idea. It’s no spoiler to say that the house appears to have a spook. That’s what every reader wants to believe, and given the situation of weird house, eccentric family they don’t need much convincing – two or three incidents of poltergeist/ghostly activity would do the job, but Waters spends several hundred pages showing the reader what they have already taken on board, give a spook some respect! The reader wants to move on, perhaps witness attempts at exorcism, hear more about the psychology of Rodrick, or the dark side of the Colonel, but instead they’re forced to sit in frustration reading about an apparently endless war of attrition between Betty (poltergeist believer) Rodrick (believer) Mrs Ayres (believer) Caroline (undecided) and Faraday (sceptic, man of science and, ‘trust me I’m a doctor!’). The reader feels like part of the audience of a pantomime where there’re frustrated shouts of, ‘behind you!’ It might well work on screen – and I’ve not seen the film of the same title – in tension build and suspense, but on the page, it seems to be overworked, over-written, and occasionally tedious. I emphasize, my view alone, others may see differently. There’s some wonderful writing though. In one scene, Faraday – who begins to think he might do worse than marry ‘plain old Miss Caroline Ayres’, takes her to a doctors’ dance. It’s written in immediate scene, brings the reader straight into the action, and gives real substance to the relationship between Faraday and Caroline. There’s a scene in Faraday’s car ‘after the ball has ended’ and it made this reader – anyway – wistful of perhaps not having gone to enough dances in his youth, and rather conscious of his own clumsiness. First rate! The question I found myself left with was, why did Waters not give Caroline a point of view -POV- of her own, then the reader could experience her mood and feelings first hand. It needn’t have weakened the denouement, nor explained the oddness of Caroline, but in my opinion it would have made better literature, rather than the work reading like an over-sized maquette intended to be later handed over to a screenwriter for the ‘serious’ business of film making?!

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