The Little Stranger
The Little Stranger is a 2009 gothic novel written by Sarah Waters. It is a ghost story set in a dilapidated mansion in Warwickshire, England in the 1940s. Departing from her earlier themes of lesbian and gay fiction, Waters' fifth novel features a male narrator, a country doctor who makes friends with an old gentry family of declining fortunes who own a very old estate that is crumbling around them. The stress of reconciling the state of their finances with the familial responsibility of keeping the estate coincides with perplexing events which may or may not be of supernatural origin, culminating in tragedy.
Reviewers note that the themes in The Little Stranger are alternately reflections of evil and struggle related to upper class hierarchy misconfiguration in post war Britain. Waters stated that she did not set out to write a ghost story, but began her writing with an exploration of the rise of socialism in the United Kingdom and how the fading gentry dealt with losing their legacies. A mix of influences is evident to reviewers: Henry James, Shirley Jackson, Wilkie Collins, and Edgar Allan Poe. The novel was mostly well received by critics as Waters' strengths are exhibited in setting of mood and pacing of the story. It is Waters' third novel to be short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.
Plot summary
In the autumn of 1948, Dr. Faraday, a struggling general practitioner in rural Warwickshire, is called to Hundreds Hall, the manor home of the Ayres family. Reminiscing about his childhood fascination with the splendid 18th Century manor, where his mother had worked as a maid before his birth, he is shocked to discover the house is now in disrepair and the Ayres family have sold off much of the house's furnishings to keep the estate afloat. He treats Betty, the Ayres' 14-year-old maid, who claims to sense something lurking in the dark, empty home. Faraday dismisses her fears as homesickness. Faraday is invited to tea by Caroline Ayres, the plain, practical daughter of the family, and meets her sardonic brother Roderick and their widowed, genteel mother. Seeing that Roderick, who has a bad leg and a number of scars gained in a wartime plane crash, is visibly struggling with the dire financials of the estate, Faraday suggests treating his bad leg with electrotherapy, doing so for free under the pretense of writing a research paper. He becomes a regular visitor to the estate, and strikes up a friendship with Caroline.Mrs Ayres throws a cocktail party to welcome a family that has just purchased another large manor in the area, the Baker-Hydes. Faraday is invited, but becomes uncomfortable with the Baker-Hydes' condescending manner, irritated at the presence of their eight-year-old daughter Gillian, and disturbed when he realizes that the party is a pretense to introduce Caroline to Mrs Baker-Hyde's unmarried brother. The party is further disturbed by Roderick's refusal to come downstairs, claiming illness. Disaster suddenly strikes when Gillian is mauled by Caroline's ancient and previously gentle labrador retriever, Gyp, receiving a disfiguring bite to the face. Faraday is able to save the girl's life but the resulting threats of legal action result in Gyp being put to sleep under Caroline's strenuous objections and the hysterical claim by the maid Betty that something unseen made the dog attack.
Roderick begins to behave moodily and drink heavily, and a concerned Caroline shows Faraday that she has discovered spots on his walls and ceiling that looking like burns in the wood. Roderick grows increasingly erratic, and confesses to a disbelieving Faraday that something appeared in his room the night of the party. He says that it was first in his room trying to harm him by moving mundane objects, and when he begged it to leave, it used the dog to attack the girl. Roderick has resolved that he must keep the unseen force focused on him so as not to direct its attention to his sister or mother, and begs Faraday to keep his terror from his family. Faraday dismisses any supernatural explanation, and tells Caroline of his concerns that Roderick is having a nervous breakdown. A furious, drunken Roderick bars him from the estate. That night, Caroline wakes to discover a fire in Roderick's room, where he has passed out drunk. Evidence suggests the fire was set deliberately in several places around the room, and Roderick is committed to a mental hospital.
Caroline takes over the management of the estate, selling off a significant part of the grounds, to Faraday's displeasure, for the building of council estates. Faraday becomes aware that gossip has begun to spread about his relationship with Caroline, and he realizes he has fallen in love with her. Caroline seems to waver between returning his feelings and a confused platonic friendship. She asks him to hide their burgeoning relationship from her mother, who is beginning to show signs of forgetfulness. Soon after, odd sounds in the house begin to alarm Caroline, Mrs Ayres, Betty and the cleaning lady, Mrs Bazeley. They experience telephones ringing in the night, bells ringing at odd times and rhythmic tapping, drumming or indiscernible flutterings heard in the walls. They find curious childish writing on the walls where these activities have taken places, which badly affects Mrs Ayres. A 19th century tube communication device linking the kitchen to the abandoned second-floor nursery begins to sound, scaring the maids. When Mrs Ayres goes to investigate, she is mysteriously locked in the nursery where Susan, her much-loved first daughter, died of diphtheria at eight years old. She experiences shadows, tapping and running footsteps behind the locked door, culminating in hearing a whispering childlike voice through the speaking tube. Frantic to escape, Mrs Ayres pounds the windows open, cutting her arms badly. After Caroline and the maids free her, Faraday is called to the house to dress her wounds. Caroline tells Faraday she believes the house is being affected by a poltergeist, which she believes is a telekinetic force caused unintentionally by a living person. She suspects Roderick's stress at trying to salvage the estate has left behind a psychic impression on the house, which has now affected both him and their mother.
Several weeks later, Mrs Ayres appears to have recovered, but Faraday is shocked to discover that she has come to believe that the ghostly presence in the house is Susan, and takes comfort that Susan is around her at all times. Faraday is shocked to see a bloody scratch appear on her chest, and Mrs Ayres explains that Susan is impatient to be with her and sometimes harms her in her eagerness. Faraday believes the wounds are self-inflicted, and convinces a reluctant Caroline to put her mother in a care home for her own safety so that they may live peacefully at Hundreds after they marry. Caroline is shocked he plans to live at the manor, but agrees that her mother should be taken to safety. The next morning, Caroline wakes to discover her mother has hanged herself in her bedroom, and that her body bears the marks of a number of seemingly-self-inflicted wounds, scratches and bites.
The day of Mrs Ayres' funeral, Faraday pressures Caroline to agree to marry him, and she agrees to a date in six weeks' time. He happily begins preparing for the wedding and begins to fantasize about living at Hundreds while a grieving Caroline is listless and uninterested in wedding planning or managing the estate. The day Faraday brings her the wedding dress and ring he has selected for her, she breaks off their engagement, telling him she does not love him and announces she plans to sell Hundreds Hall and move abroad. Faraday refuses to accept her decision and throws the ring at her, cracking a window pane. He tries several times to talk Caroline out of her decision with increasing vehemence and desperation.
On the night of their would-be wedding, Faraday has a call that takes him out until the middle of the night, and he falls asleep in his car near the grounds of Hundreds Hall. When he finally comes home the next morning, he learns that Caroline is dead, having fallen from the second floor onto a marble landing. At the inquest, Betty reports that she awoke to hear Caroline go upstairs to investigate a sound she heard in the darkened hall. She simply cried out "You!" then fell to her death. Betty publicly shares her belief that the house was haunted, to the court's general derision. Faraday is asked to testify at the inquest, and has a momentary vision on the stand of Caroline fleeing from something in terror. He pulls himself together and testifies that Caroline had also believed the house to be haunted, and that he believes her death was a suicide.
Three years later, Faraday's practice is thriving under the new National Health Service and Hundreds Hall remains unsold. Faraday retains the only keys to the now-derelict mansion, and caretakes for the home as much as he can. The novel closes as he reflects that as much as he tries to discover what Caroline saw the night she died, he can only ever see his own reflection in a cracked window pane.
Style
Sara O'Leary in The Gazette states that Waters' narrative voice is her strongest asset and that she has an "uncanny ability to synthesize her research and is never expository in the telling details she draws upon—tiny little things about what people wore or ate or had in their houses". Emma Donoghue in The Globe and Mail remarks on the diversion from the narrative style in The Little Stranger. Waters is known in her previous four novels for providing plot twists, but this one, notes Donoghue, provides a straightforward accounting that tackles issues of insanity, poltergeists, and family secrets "with a minimum of tricks". The review in The Washington Post concurs, using a quote by Henry James to say everything to be done in the way of ghost stories and haunted houses has been done. Ron Charles states that the novel is not clichéd due to Waters' restraint: "the story's sustained ambiguity is what keeps our attention, and her perfectly calibrated tone casts an unnerving spell". A similar review appeared in The Australian calling attention to Waters' "moderation and flawless cadence" that forms "a story pulsing with malevolent energy" and an "atmosphere is wickedly, addictively tense".In The Sunday Telegraph, John Preston writes that "the richness of Waters's writing ensures that the air of thickening dread is very thick indeed. Everything, from Mrs Ayres's 'absurdly over-engineered shoes', to the hairs on Caroline's legs—each one 'laden with dust, like an eye-blacked lash'—is described with a wonderfully sharp eye." Waters herself acknowledges the light-handedness of the supernatural elements of the story, stating "I wanted the ghost story to be fairly subtle. The ghost stories that I've enjoyed are uncanny, unsettling and eerie more than they are about in-your-face pyrotechnics. I wanted it to be very based in the social context of the time, but for it to have this extra element of strangeness."
Several references in The Little Stranger indicate the influences Waters used in its composition. Rebecca Starford in The Australian praises Waters' ability to use elements from other authors: "Waters is one of the great contemporary storytellers. She has never made bones about borrowing", noting that her inspirations for this story were Daphne du Maurier, Henry James, Agatha Christie, and Charles Dickens. As children, Roderick and Caroline changed the hands of a broken clock to twenty minutes to nine, thinking it amusing to reflect the stopped clocks of Miss Havisham's house from Dickens' Great Expectations. Like the narrator of du Maurier's Rebecca, Faraday has no first name; the man overcome by the house in Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher is also named Roderick. Peter Cannon in Publishers Weekly writes that the novel is evocative of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House.