I think The Little Stranger could be called a thriller. More in the traditional gothic style of thriller though, rather than a heart-pounding, non-stop action, people-running-all-over-the-place, car-chases-and-stuff-exploding thriller. Is there such a thing as a quiet or muted thriller?
See, what quiets this story down are the hard-to-miss elements - class structure and psychology.
Let's start with class structure. The first person to sense something weird going on in Hundreds Hall is the maid, Betty. As a servant, and a barely teenaged one at that, her fears are attributed to homesickness and an overactive and childish imagination. At best, she's not abused by her employers, and they come to rely on her for companionship in the big, lonely house. But even with such decent treatment, her employers wouldn't hesitate to ask her to do some chore or other at a moment's thought - she and they never forget that she is a servant. Even at the end of the story, when she is the chief witness of the final event, she is not believed, and for the same reasons she was not believed at the beginning of the story. Her triumph is that she soldiered through all the events and came out relatively unscathed, which can't be said for other characters.
Next is Doctor Faraday, the narrator of the story. His mother was a servant at the Hall. She wanted him to have a better life and saw to it that he got a better education. He becomes a doctor, but only a local one with not much of a practice, although he does start to make a name for himself and become more well-known and respected toward the end of the story. He might be above the station of a maid, but not by much. He often comments on feeling out-of-place with the Ayres family at the Hall, and with others he considers above himself. The evening party at the Hall is the prime example of this, although he ends up being the hero of the evening when a major event happens. He is ever sensible, honest, trustworthy, sympathetic, the one you rely on for stability, and little seems to shake his beliefs or determination, even when facing impossible things or Caroline's rejection of him in the end. He has moments of doubt, which increase the longer he knows the family and the goings on at the Hall, but he clings to the rational despite that. He's boring, and he knows it. Oddly, this is a good thing because as narrator, he's not getting in the way of the story. I appreciated that.
There's Seeley, a rival doctor, and there's the family lawyer, both of whom are a bit better off than Faraday, and he feels it and lets the reader know it. Dr Graham and his wife seem to be the only ones on his level, as it were, and he has a genuine friendship with them.
Finally, we have the Ayres family. Shabby genteel is probably the term for them. And getting shabbier all the time. Roderick served in the war and was badly injured in it. His sister and mother nursed him back to some semblance of health. He's head of the household, at least for awhile, and then he falls apart trying to contain "the infection" of the house. Faraday attributes this to latent stress from his war experiences (I suppose today it would be called post-traumatic stress disorder) as well as the strain of trying to keep the estate going with no money or resources. About halfway through the story, Roderick's part is done, and he's packed off to a mental hospital. One expects a downward spiral for the family after that, and one gets it, almost too predictably.
The mother is next. Mrs Ayres represents old-fashioned grace and stiff upper lip, and is the most class-conscious character in the story. She is fragile, stronger in mind and resilience than her children give her credit for, at least for awhile. It is the loss of her first daughter, years ago, that is her undoing. It is an oddly calm undoing, too. Unlike Roderick's.
Caroline was the character I grappled with the most. I kept picturing her as an older, frumpy woman; however, I think she was meant to be younger, but stout and healthy. That Faraday would find her attractive seemed odd to me, and their relationship fizzling wasn't a big surprise since she had an air of reluctance about it all the way through. I wanted to root for her at the end. I wanted her to succeed and start a new life after all the tragedy she'd been through. It was disappointing that it didn't happen, and her exit was abrupt.
Now for the psychology. This book has an even rhythm - almost too even. Things are humming along, normal as anything, for about a third of the book, then (finally!) something weird happens in the house. Things settle down for awhile after that, and then something else weird happens in the house. This goes all the way through to the end. Is that to lead the reader to think that this is nothing more than a chronicle of the destruction of a mentally unbalanced family? Faraday certainly wants to believe that's all it is. In a number of scenes, he's rather condescendingly trying to get the family to buy into his idea of the true cause of their troubles - war weariness, lack of money, just the three of them in a crumbling house. After all, it's safe, logical, and sound, and perhaps makes the manifestation of events a little more bearable for those involved.
Interestingly, Faraday is never in the house when the mysterious happenings, well, happen - he sees the result of them and hears about what happened from the family, which lends credence to his theories. Still, the events are described in such a way that it's easy to see why the family are inclined to a supernatural explanation, and why they're frustrated that Faraday doesn't believe them. The story ends with finality for the family, but none for what caused it. I have a guess about who the "little stranger" was, and I'm not sure why this wasn't brought out more explicitly. The ambiguity of was it all in their heads or did something supernatural cause events isn't satisfying.
One thing that was satisfying was the narration. Faraday narrated the story in a first-person voice, and it actually worked really well. It read smoothly and naturally and believably. Unlike the first-person narration in The Swan Thieves, which sounded clunky and forced. Obviously, first-person point of view is hard to do well. Sarah Waters definitely knows what she's doing with it.
Another strong aspect of the story was the house itself. Waters captured the atmosphere of a crumbling English estate just after the war just about perfectly. And she shows it decaying even further throughout the story, which lends weight to the supernatural possibilities and the menace of the place.
Overall, it was a good story, well told. I quibble with the ambiguous ending, but not much else.
My next read is The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt. It's a doorstopper!
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