By Kohinoor Dasgupta
(Originally published on May 26, 2011 in my blog Draupadiarjun)
(This review contains spoilers)
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters is one book about which the debate hasn’t stopped since its publication in 2009. Was it a ghost? Was it a person? The author wrote a piece about all the questions surrounding the book in The Guardian on August 7, 2010. You can read it here:
I have read only one other Waters, Affinity, which I liked, and which, coincidentally, I read just after finishing Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt. I didn’t know while reading Affinity that all Waters’ celebrated novels up to The Little Stranger had lesbian characters.
Waters is a fine, honest and scrupulous writer, I got that even after my first speed-read of the novel when I laid the book down convinced that Dr Faraday was another Dr Sheppard. Then, because I found Waters a fine, honest and scrupulous writer, I read the book one more time, looking for the clues she’s said she’s spiked the narrative with. Well, I don’t know whether I found her clues, but this time I finished with a different theory about the resident poltergeist…
World War II has ended and Prime Minister Clement Atlee’s Labor government is not looking after the British aristocrats at all, or so is the gloomy feeling in the Ayres household. The enormous Georgian house that the three Ayres survivors occupy is a bleak house now, with no money to keep up with the maintenance. Most of its rooms stay locked, and its lovely windows, designed to make the interiors silken with light, are troublesome when the chill sets in. Ivy covers flying stairs, shaggy weeds encroach on the driveway, the sprawling park is divested of planned and tended glory, and the unmodernized dairy farm is worked by one disgruntled man.
The last man to manage the estate well was the late Colonel Ayres. His widow, a woman in her early fifties, is resigned to living out her days in diminishing comfort. Her son, who returned wounded from the war, twenty-four-year-old Roderick, struggles to keep up with the paperwork, reminding us of the unfortunate Richard Carstone, who perished waiting to come into his fortune in Bleak House. In Roderick’s case, of course, it’s the burden of living with the loss of his privileges and expectations -- symbolized by the crumbling house -- that turns the screw. Caroline, the twenty-seven-year-old sister, a former Wren, complains endlessly about money but does the practical things to keep life going at Hundreds Hall. Mrs Bazeley comes in to do the heavier chores in the daytime, but scrawny teen Betty is the only live-in servant.
The narrator, Dr Faraday, calls because Betty complains of a stomach ache, but concludes the girl is malingering. The girl actually wants to leave, she is vaguely afraid of the house. Dr Faraday, in spite of all that he tells us in the 463 pages of the hardcover edition, remains faceless. We never get a description of him that is not colored by his low self-esteem. Once he looks at a mirror and sees his thinning hair (he is forty), and concludes he looks more and more like the grocer’s son he is. At the end of the book, a window-pane reflects his face back to him, but we don’t see it. From other doctors in the county we hear he is competent; from his interactions with patients we get an impression of a rather dour, vigorous and extremely hard-working man, who doesn’t doubt his professional skill, but has a defeatist attitude towards his prospects as a first-generation educated man whose mother used to be a nursery maid at Hundreds before she married and quit their service.
No one was happy, neither the Ayreses, nor Betty, nor Dr Faraday; nevertheless life was chugging along for all of them in the quiet Warwickshire village. But after the doctor starts taking a somewhat keener interest than we may consider normal in the welfare of the Ayreses, misfortune after misfortune strikes at Hundreds Hall. It’s as though the snobby two-hundred-year-old mansion won’t stand for the mixing of the classes. However, till the very last page, it plays no direct tricks on the doctor.
Excluding the first and last chapters, the story spans from a mid-July day after the war to the night of May 27-28 the following year. When Dr Faraday first meets the Ayreses, they seem normal enough, Caroline with her pet Labrador Gyp at her heels, standoffish Roderick and gracious and pretty Mrs Ayres. But then, the doctor was an outsider then, and the Ayreses probably seemed that way to most people they knew, either as their social equals or in the aura of being the local squire’s family. Nothing very terrible happens till one evening when the Ayres are entertaining. Among the guests are the Baker-Hydes, successful and confident Londoners who have bought Standish, another stately manor in the county. Their little girl is the target of the first vicious paranormal attack. And, if we believe that Roderick wasn’t delusional, he’d just been completely spooked in an adjacent room when the attack on eight-year-old Gillian took place.
Waters has clearly stated in the Guardian article that she wanted a poltergeist that was created by the living:
“In other words, while Hundreds Hall, my fictional setting for the novel, was definitely to be a haunted house, it was to be haunted not by the spirits of the dead, but by the unconscious aggressions and frustrations of the living. I wanted The Little Stranger to be a sort of supernatural country house whodunit – a "whose poltergeist is it?" – in which the Hall's hapless inhabitants would get picked off one by one, and every character – the grieving mother, the war-scarred son, the spinster daughter, the lonely servant, the whole changing nation around them – would have more than enough unconscious conflicts to constitute a possible "suspect"."
Of course, she added to this already promising field the doctor who has troubled nights and, some way into the sinister events, keys to the padlocked park gate and the kitchen door. Dr Faraday is not present at many of the hauntings. However, at one point in the book Caroline was suggesting that somehow a doppelgänger of Roderick’s was staging the creepy events long-distance. If a long-distance agency was to be blamed, we wonder why she didn’t suspect the doctor as well.
For me, the scariest piece of writing in the book was that about Mrs Ayres in the nursery, the only time, for me, that delusion and reality blurred.
Fed on a diet of whodunits, I think of logical possibilities. Who benefited? Who was present in the house? Who suggested an extra-human agency? Whose fears contrasted with their normal calm, clear intelligence? What if there were two killers? What if one particular incident did no belong with the others?
Have fun figuring….
Also, I’d like to pose a question to those fans of Waters who are disappointed (see: http://www.afterellen.com/people/2009/5/sarahwaters) that there are no lesbian characters in the book: Are you sure?
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