The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
This is one of the books I got on a 3 for 2 offer, using a kindly Christmas GiftCard. Sarah Waters is one of my favourite contemporary writers. She plunges one very vividly into dark, gothic Victorian landscapes with intricate plots and, in Affinity and Fingersmith at least, an undertow of despair. I didn’t get on so well with The Night Watch, the book completed just previously to this one and set in the Second World War, but that may be because I was sulking about being so briskly weaned off the claustrophobic Victorian Gothic I so enjoyed. Perhaps I will reread it soon.
The Little Stranger is set in the Post-war period, but is very gothic indeed.
The surviving members of the Ayres family: Mrs Ayres, her son Roderick and her daughter Caroline live in Warwickshire in the once elegant Hundreds Hall, an eighteenth century mansion, now in a state of decay. They are visited by a Dr Faraday, who is called in to attend upon the servant.
Central to this book is the depiction of the changes in the social fabric of Britain in the Post-War period. The Ayres family and Dr Faraday can be seen as representative of the old order and the new. The Ayres are, in some sense, dinosaurs, struggling to maintain their crumbling mansion, but living on a level of genteel poverty and hardship that the working class families, who are moving into the council flats with all mod cons that are being built nearby, would no longer expect to tolerate. Dr Faraday, by contrast, is the son of a servant, who has achieved the middle class status of doctor through his ability, hard work and great sacrifices on the part of his parents. The old order still holds sway however: it is something of a shock to learn that the Ayres keep a fourteen year old girl as their live-in drudge. It would be a year or so yet before the school leaving age was raised to 16.
Following Dr. Faraday’s initial professional visit, he gradually becomes an indispensable friend of the family and a witness to the troubles which descend upon their heads.
As misfortunes are visited upon the family, the increasingly omnipresent Dr Faraday struggles to reassure them that there can only be rational explanations for the happenings that plague the Ayres, in the face of their growing insistence that the house is tenanted by some uncanny evil. Their struggle to hold on to the decaying mansion with its closed off, derelict apartments becomes more desperate even as this reader, at least, could not help inwardly urging the characters to just pack up and leave. The family’s efforts to keep up appearances and maintain their status arouses both sympathy and exasperation. Caroline the sister is an intelligent, capable woman, who enjoyed life in the WRENS, during the War. She is seemingly doomed to spinsterhood, being a plain awkward woman in her middle twenties. She wanders around the countryside with her dog, picking berries and helping with the milking. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that she could simply get a job and bring in an income. Roderick, a once bright and promising young man, was seriously physically and mentally scarred by a “smash” in the RAF. His life is bedevilled by great mounds of paperwork on his desk that represent the financial troubles of Hundreds Hall.
Discussion of social analysis in the novel must not detract from the fact that this is a genuinely scary, creepy book. The atmosphere of the decaying old mansion and its inhabitants, marooned in time is brilliantly evoked by Caroline’s reference to the fact that the stopped stable clock was once playfully manipulated by them as children so that it matches the permanently stopped clock of Miss Havisham. Even at an early stage in the narrative Caroline recognises that the joke has worn distinctly unfunny.
The atmosphere is quite similar to that of Affinity, where uncanny events are afoot and there is an atmosphere of malevolence, but unlike in Affinity, we are not provided with a rational explanation at the end, or not one that conforms to contemporary ideas about what is rational. Reminiscent of Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher and also, to me, of stories like Maupassant’s The Horla in which the reader has a rather clearer apprehension than the narrator that all is far from being well. Very much recommended.
