Once again Sarah Waters has written a ripping good tale that kept me glued to its pages late into the night until I could no longer keep my eyes open, and got me up early the following morning to finish. It's clever and complex and relies as much on the reader's perceptions and beliefs as on the storyteller's ability to convincingly describe events that take place in this chilling tale. And yes, for me there were chilling moments. As strange as it sounds I love reading ghost stories though I can't really say I believe in ghosts, so it takes a talented writer to pull something like this off. And I thought Sarah Waters pulled off The Little Stranger remarkably well.
Choosing a grand estate in post-WWII England as the setting for this story was a bit of a coup. Aside from having a suitably mouldering and dilapidated place for the ghost to appear (and what better place for ghosts to be knocking about), there are all sorts of historical and social angles that feed into the complexity of the story to give it just the right tinge of reality. I should be cautious here when I say 'ghosts', because ghosts can really mean more than the obvious, and in this story not everything is obvious.
The story is narrated by a local doctor, Dr Faraday, who first encountered Hundreds Hall and the Ayres family in 1919 when he was a boy.
"I first saw Hundreds Hall when I was ten years old. It was the summer after the war, and the Ayreses still had most of their money then, were still big people in the district. The event was an Empire Day fete: I stood with a line of other village children making a Boy Scout salute while Mrs Ayres and the Colonel went past us, handing out commemorative medals; afterwards we sat to tea with our parents at long tables on what I suppose was the south lawn. Mrs Ayres would have been twenty-four or -five, her husband a few years older; their little girl, Susan, would have been about six. They must have made a very handsome family, but my memory of them is vague. I recall most vividly the house itself, which struck me as an absolute mansion. I remember its lovely ageing details: the worn red brick, the cockled window glass, the weathered sandstone edgings. They made it look blurred and slightly uncertain--like an ice, I thought, just beginning to melt in the sun."
He goes on to relate how his mother was once a nurserymaid for the family before she herself married. She still had friends among the servants and he was allowed inside the house for a closer peek. The house works its charm on him so much so that he removes a small acorn detail from a decorative plaster border, not out of orneriness but a desire to possess a part of something that he's enamored of.
The story properly begins some thirty years later when both the Ayres family and the Hall have fallen on hard times. Mrs Ayres lives at the Hall with her two grown children, her first daughter having succumbed to an illness in childhood and her husband having since passed away. Really it's only by chance that Dr Faraday ends up back at the Hall. Working with another doctor, Faraday has built up a small country practice; his parents had slaved away so he would have a chance at a better life, one slightly above the station he was born into. Faraday is called to Hundreds to treat a parlourmaid while his partner is away and is appalled to see the state the Hall has fallen into.
Mrs Ayres is still a handsome woman, elegant but old fashioned. She seems to belong to an earlier era. Roderick and Caroline are close siblings who constantly play off each other's personalities. Still youthful, Roderick returned from the war with a painful limp and a scarred face having been an RAF pilot, and now he is burdened with the impossible task of trying to set the estate to rights with ever diminishing funds. Slightly older than her brother, Caroline is what's known in the village as a 'natural spinster' or a 'clever girl', which really means she's plain--over tall with thickish legs and ankles. While the family's finances and standing has declined, they stubbornly cling to a fading way of life, even keeping a uniformed maid to wait on them full time. Faraday feels alternately fascinated by the family and the once beautiful Hall and repulsed by their seemingly backwards attitudes and flippancy towards the lower social classes when a more progressive social climate has emerging since the end of the war.
Faraday manages to insinuate himself with the family, spending more and more time at the Hall as he tries to if not cure Rod's limp, then at least make it less difficult for him to walk. It's often painfully obvious just how different Faraday is from the Ayrses and their friends, but he becomes a regular fixture there. The story takes an odd turn when totally out of character, Caroline's sweet-tempered dog, Gyp, bites a young girl attending a party at the Hall. And now strange things begin happening. Okay, I'm not going to take you beyond this point. No worries, I've not told you anything you wouldn't glean from the first chapter or so, and naturally I've left out all the really good bits!
I read that it took Sarah Waters two and a half years to write this novel, and it shows in the precision of the writing and the psychological depth of the characters. Once again it's all pitch perfect. She knows just when to ratchet up the tension and when to pull back and feed the reader more information. I think what made this story so successful for me, was how she balanced out the rational with the irrational (or perhaps supernatural). I had a few moments of disbelief and then she would throw something into the mix that would make me question my own uncertainty. But I never really felt I needed to suspend belief entirely in order to make the story work, it was plausible but also very, very subtle. I have two unread novels by Waters sitting on my shelves and I suspect I'll have them both read by the end of the year. I really liked this one!