Sarah Waters’s fiction to date has offered a series of imaginative
interventions in literary history. Her trio of remakings of Victorian novels
was followed in 2006 by The Night Watch, where she boldly worked backwards
from 1948 to 1941, using three interlinked narratives dominated by the 1941
Blitz and the recurrence of bombing in early 1944. The manipulation of time
in that novel is more than a mannerism: it lends poignancy to the stories;
it also affirms that the Second World War exerts an inescapable attraction
for memory and imagination, which are always seeking to re-enter a period
when even the mundane and the tiresome took on strange colours. In The Night
Watch, as in David Hare’s play Plenty, peace may seem disappointing (and
worse than disappointing) in comparison. In her new book, The Little
Stranger, which has a slow, relentless, forward movement, peace becomes
problematic, if not illusory. For most of the characters, recent history has
somehow slipped away and taken the world with it.
Waters has been called a pasticheur, but her artistry is altogether more
serious than the term would suggest. The Night Watch is for example full of
echoes of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, set in 1944, and her story
“Mysterious Kor”, but the world of Bowen’s Stella and Louie is taken
outdoors by Waters, and their unexpected connection is multiplied to depict
a group of women involved in ambulance driving and other wartime work,
presented with vividness and power, and a grasp of detail that requires a
great deal more than literary archaeology to animate it. There are also nods
to the grim and vinegary imaginings of Patrick Hamilton, as well as perhaps,
in a less specific way, to Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear. These
allusions serve an atmosphere of private crisis undergone in a time of
national threat, and they also speak to Waters’s understanding of tone: the
English voices of Night Watch are always slightly but convincingly alien to
a contemporary reader, and this remains the case in the new book.
The Little Stranger (which is perhaps the second in a loose trilogy of novels)
is set in 1948, as the National Health Service is about to come into being,
and is narrated by Faraday, a general practitioner with a struggling
practice in rural Warwickshire. He encounters a local county family, the
Ayreses, residents of the Georgian Hundreds Hall, when he is summoned to
treat a servant girl, Betty, who is homesick and alarmed by the gloomy,
decaying house (a frightened housemaid also features in Affinity).
Faraday’s position is uncertain: he is not the doctor of choice for the
gentry; he comes from a local labouring family but has ended up neither a
convinced meritocrat nor a class warrior. For him, as for a great many GPs,
the NHS seems more like a threat than an opportunity. He remembers visiting
Hundreds Hall as a child on Empire Day when his mother worked there, and
sneaking down its mysterious corridors from beyond the servants’ curtain. At
once fascinated and repelled by the Ayreses’ strangely durable sense that
the world is there to serve and entertain them, he gradually becomes a
friend to Mrs Ayres, her war-wounded son Roddie and “brainy” (i.e. plain)
daughter, Caroline. The family fortune has gone and the estate is in
difficulties. Roddie struggles to cope with its management and Mrs Ayres is
looking for a husband for Caroline, though Caroline seems reconciled to
spinsterhood. The working class are literally coming through the gates, with
land sold to build a council estate in view of the house. Attlee is a name
invoked with loathing.
“After two hundred years, [the local] people had begun to withdraw their
labour, their belief in the house, and the house was collapsing . . . .” Yet
it is not enough for the Ayres family to have lost its power and status and
much of its “county” identity. Something else, the little stranger of the
title, is at work at Hundreds Hall. A social-realist treatment of provincial
life is married to a supernatural tale whose horrors, at once highly
specific and oblique, are in a line of descent from M. R. James while
delivering the sudden savagery of Bowen’s story “The Demon Lover”. Thus
aspects of Waters’s third novel, the spiritualist nightmare Affinity, are
combined with others from The Night Watch.
In a curious way, however, despite its Gothic ancestry, The Little Stranger is
an austerity novel, working with deliberately restricted means. While the
book contains a number of impressive set pieces, it is formally less
interesting than its predecessor. Its focus is narrower, its world thinner
in texture; there is necessarily little of the rich sensual life of The
Night Watch; and the narrative is confined by the choice of Faraday as
narrator. He is a decent, humane man, concerned for his patients and for the
welfare of the Ayres family, but he is a dull dog, so painstaking in his
narration as to raise the question of whether Waters has set herself a
challenge: to mediate her story through the consciousness of a bore. A
rationalist of unquestionable sanity is a useful counterweight to the
bizarre events taking place in the house, but a little of Faraday goes a
long way. It is not surprising, but it is noteworthy, that he has no sense
of humour, not that there is much to laugh about.
Alongside episodes of memorable horror, class is the most interesting element
in The Little Stranger. Indeed, the first unsettling incident is bound up
with the thoughtless arrivistes whom Mrs Ayres has invited to a grisly party
in the dank squalor of Hundreds Hall in the hope of doing some matchmaking.
The Baker-Hydes’ small and odious daughter is bitten by the Ayreses’ affable
dog, which is put down after legal threats from the distraught parents. The
Ayreses are not the only people ever to protest that their dog has acted out
of character, but for them it is as if reality has cracked asunder, placing
them at the mercy of their inferiors.
The next stage is Roddie’s accelerating disintegration into madness, confined
to his room by the torments of the little stranger. Waters stages a superb
depiction of the menace of inanimate objects, including a mirror, which
recalls the breakdown of Michael Redgrave’s ventriloquist in the 1945
country house film, Dead of Night. The atmosphere of dank grubbiness, with
dark patches on the ceiling, scribbled messages emerging through walls, and
a growing un-certainty about the borders of self and place (as in Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”) is horribly persuasive. At times,
as in the mirror episode, Waters makes the stubbornly middlebrow genre she
has chosen to work in rise to something more metaphorical, evoking a
malevolent disorder which will not release its victims from the past but
condemns them to be suffocated there, as though by “the strangler”,
diphtheria, the once-feared childhood illness which lingers in the
background here.
Faraday himself is drawn into the mystery. He also falls in love with
Caroline, crossing class lines to the sceptical consternation of local
society. Another impressive set piece, a dance at the local hospital,
propels the pair into an awkward intimacy which culminates in a botched
sexual encounter, described in characteristic detail by Waters – one of the
few occasions when the physical life of which she writes so well can come to
the fore. The sterility of the relationship – set in relief against the
hangover of wartime sexual permissiveness – would be apparent to anyone but
Faraday. He has misunderstood the rules of the game, and so, for a time, has
Caroline. She breaks their engagement, but the disasters are not yet over.
Waters’s juxtaposition of a time of political change with the haunted interior
world of Hundreds Hall is ambitious and original. Here again, though, the
question of dullness comes up. The nearby village, and Leamington and
Birmingham beyond it, and the lives of their populations, are generalized,
mundane and colourless, a matter of hard work for most, with some people
living in extremes of want. The problem is not lack of variety but the
characters’ lack of imagination: their thin nostalgia is drained of colour
and vigour. Must this be so for all of them?
Change is slow but under Attlee’s Labour administration it has taken hold. The
visible cost of reform is the sale of land, ugly new housing and the arrival
of people who inside a generation will have no idea of what Hundreds Hall
represented. While the Ayres lament the demolition of a wall which exposes
the Hall to view, the residents of the estate soon ask for a fence to be put
up to replace it, since the Hall is “creepy”. One might expect Hundreds Hall
to offer a romantic alternative to brash bricks and mortar, but it has
passed the point of no return: the past has no sustenance to offer Mrs Ayres
as she leafs through mouldering and water-damaged photograph albums. It is
useful to be reminded that the problem was not wholly economic, and that
enthusiasm for preserving historic houses was by no means universal in the
years following the war. They had lost both their usefulness and their claim
on the local population, while a sense of their aesthetic appeal had yet to
be widely disseminated. As Christopher Woodward notes in his book In Ruins,
by 1955 the rate of demolition of such places was two a week.
At the close of the novel, the locals may have withdrawn their belief, but
when Faraday encounters Betty, the former housemaid, out with a boyfriend,
she recounts her recurring dream of refusing gifts from Mrs Ayres. Hundreds
Hall has nothing to offer her now, while Faraday himself has never really
been part of the place and has never seen the putative ghost, only his own
“baffled and longing” face in the “cracked pane” of the derelict Hall.
Sarah Waters
THE LITTLE STRANGER
499pp. Virago. £16.99.
978 1 84408 601 6
Sean O'Brien's collection of short stories, The Silence Room, appeared
earlier this year. His new novel, Afterlife, will be published in August. He
is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle.
