What Book to Read?

This is, as it says on the cover, a ghost story. It is also a slice of social history. After some initial doubts, I decided Waters does a terrific job of tying these together.

It is 1948 in England. The war is over, but the scars are still visible. Change is in the air, but not everyone is looking forward to it. Dr Faraday, a local GP, is called to Hundreds Hall, a decaying Georgian mansion is rural Warwickshire, to treat a servant. He gets to know the family – Mrs Ayres and her grown up children Roderick and Caroline, who are struggling to keep the place going. But strange and terrible things start happening at Hundreds Hall.

The Ayres are local gentry, but lack the capital to make a go of farming; the Hall is sucking the economic life out of them. They have even had to sell part of their park to the local council for a housing estate. They all to some degree resent their situation; Atlee and the Labour government are to blame. ‘Ordinary people hate our sort now, don’t you see,’ says Roderick. Faraday is a local too, but has risen from humble beginnings; his mother was once a servant at the Hall. He knows that change is needed – his patients’ poor living conditions are more than enough evidence of that. But he is worried about the impact of the impending National Health System, and his imagination is caught by the beauty of the old Hall. Hyde Parker, an architect, and Maurice Babb, a builder, in their different ways represent the coming age; the new meritocracy grates against the old gentry.

The story is narrated by Faraday, though most of the weird goings-on are related to him by others. They are presented as things that actually happen. But Faraday, a twentieth century man of science, cannot believe there is anything supernatural at work. He finds a ‘rational answer’, a medical explanation; there is something wrong with the person to whom these things happen. At first he thinks ‘nervousness’, then ‘delusion’. Is there some ‘family taint’? Or is it that the family, unable to cope in the modern world, seeks refuge in madness?

But why does a medical answer feel so wrong? And doesn’t Faraday’s approach only make things worse? For all his scepticism, Faraday himself can’t help feeling that ‘a far stranger thing’ is at work. Is the Hall literally sucking the life out of the Ayres? Waters has done a brilliant job of leaving the reader (as well as Faraday) unsatisfied by any explanation. I think her cleverness lies partly in the factual way in which the peculiar happenings are reported; this somehow manages to make Faraday’s rationality itself seem odd. It also lies in the picture she has drawn of Faraday, a self proclaimed ‘poacher’, making his way illicitly across boundaries, at ease with neither the old order nor the new; can we really believe in his rational explanation?

Waters has been described as a ventriloquist, able to reproduce the voices of past eras. She certainly conveys a convincing picture of England in 1948. It is not just the details – though these are impeccable. It is as much the tone of the writing. There are the deliberately dated phrases: ‘Awfully brainy girl, of course’, or ‘She pulled a face at the thought’ or ‘she was awfully dim’ to pick a few at random. And there is a restraint in the expression no longer found today, as when Faraday describes his surgery: ‘It’s a plain enough place. But my patients know it; and it suits a bachelor, I suppose.’ It’s the ‘enough’ and the ‘suppose’ that do it.

This is Sarah Waters’s fifth book. You can find out more about her here. Published in 2009, The Little Stranger is the third of her books to be short-listed for both the Man Booker and the Orange prize for literature.